Gamestar Electronic Entertainment's official exchange meeting.
An event inviting game developers.
The developers invited were not already well-known figures, but rather people still struggling at the grassroots level—young dreamers, or newcomers to game development who still held onto their dreams.
Of course, this also included those who had previously accused Gamestar Electronic Entertainment of unfairly taking down their games.
This was a rare chance to confront Takayuki face to face—how could they possibly miss it?
Moreover, they believed that if they handled this properly, their own reputations might rise as well, and that their future games could attract much more attention.
With those thoughts in mind, Hanladi and several others followed the instructions and arrived in Silicon Valley, USA.
This was the current U.S. headquarters of Gamestar Electronic Entertainment.
To prepare for this meeting, Gamestar Electronic Entertainment had specially borrowed a lecture hall from its partner, the Morgan Group.
The Morgan Group was immensely wealthy, and the scale of its office spaces far exceeded what ordinary people could imagine.
Gamestar Electronic Entertainment was praised as the best game company and one of the best companies to work for—and the Morgan Group was hardly inferior.
The entire hall covered roughly ten thousand square meters and could easily accommodate two to three thousand people.
For Hanladi, this was his first time entering a place like this, and he was quite astonished.
In the past, someone like him wouldn't have had the qualifications or means to step into such a venue.
But now he did—and if he had to say, he even owed Gamestar Electronic Entertainment a bit of thanks for that opportunity.
Still, that didn't change the fact that he intended to criticize Gamestar Electronic Entertainment.
After all, they had cut off his source of income.
If Gamestar Electronic Entertainment failed to give them a satisfactory solution today, they had decided they simply wouldn't leave.
After about half an hour, the venue had filled with seven to eight hundred people.
All of them were game developers from around the world.
Gamestar Electronic Entertainment had publicly announced this event as a meet-and-exchange session for independent game developers.
Takayuki himself would attend as a special guest, personally discussing game development details with the developers present.
With Takayuki's participation, the value of the event immediately skyrocketed, and a large number of people signed up.
Normally, it was extremely difficult to see a "god of games" like Takayuki in person. Now that such an opportunity had finally come, independent developers were naturally thrilled.
"Hanladi, over here!"
Hanladi entered the venue and looked around, when someone suddenly called out to him.
He recognized the person as another developer whose game had also been forcibly taken down.
Like Hanladi, he had made a game riding on the cyberpunk hype.
But unlike Hanladi, he wasn't as flamboyant—or as unlucky.
He hadn't made much money, but at least he hadn't gotten carried away and thrown celebration parties before the money actually arrived.
"Didn't expect to meet you here. It really isn't easy—developers like us rarely get chances to exchange ideas," the man said.
Hanladi sighed. "That's true. But now that we've met, we're acquainted. If there's a chance in the future, we should meet more often."
"Definitely. Let's stay in touch!"
After some small talk, Hanladi began speaking with clear intent. "By the way, what Gamestar Electronic Entertainment has been doing lately is really outrageous. I came today mainly to demand an explanation. I wonder if you all feel the same…"
"We do too. Our games were taken down for no reason at all, and we heard it was personally ordered by that so-called 'god of games,' Takayuki. I bet he saw that we were making money off cyberpunk while his own game hasn't even been released yet, so he got jealous and lashed out."
"Hmph. Cyberpunk is a cultural concept that everyone should be free to use. But clearly, Gamestar Electronic Entertainment is trying to treat cyberpunk as its private property. I'm already prepared—I'm going to question Takayuki face to face later."
Hanladi sneered and pulled out a thick stack of prepared documents from his backpack.
To attend this meeting, he had painstakingly written a long manuscript, just waiting for the moment to confront Takayuki directly.
He had consulted various sources—laws, regulations, industry rules, ethical standards, and more.
And his article was packed with emotional appeals.
A game he had worked so hard to develop was suddenly taken down as if it were worthless, without any explanation at all. Takayuki was nothing less than an unforgivable devil!
While this group gathered to discuss angrily, elsewhere in the venue, other people were talking about entirely different things.
These were developers whose games had not been ordered taken down by Takayuki.
Strictly speaking, the quality of their games wasn't outstanding either, but each of their cyberpunk-style games had its own characteristics. At most, they were riding the trend—but they hadn't crossed the line into shameless reskinning.
Among them were even one or two games that had genuinely impressed Takayuki.
They were the ones who had actually benefited from the cyberpunk boom.
"My game was inexplicably placed in a really good recommendation slot on Battle.net, and my sales skyrocketed."
"Same here! My cyberpunk text-based adventure was just a spur-of-the-moment idea I turned into a game. I never expected Gamestar Electronic Entertainment to officially recommend it—it completely caught me off guard."
These developers felt both flattered and excited.
Thanks to Gamestar Electronic Entertainment's official recommendations, they had earned hundreds of thousands—or even over a million—dollars on the Battle.net platform, with sales surpassing ten thousand copies.
For independent developers like them, this was an unbelievable windfall.
So while many people online were accusing Gamestar Electronic Entertainment of taking down games, these developers were also doing their best, in their own way, to defend Gamestar.
At least from their perspective, Gamestar Electronic Entertainment had treated them extremely well.
And then, aside from these groups, there were also independent developers who had come purely out of admiration.
Among them was the trio of Kazu-mi, Otone, and Aiko.
As Takayuki's legendary top disciple, Aiko had indeed once considered riding the cyberpunk trend to make a game. She had even drawn up plans—once her current project was finished, she intended to start developing a cyberpunk-style game.
However, Gamestar Electronic Entertainment's swift and ruthless removal of many cyberpunk games had made her cautious.
She worried that Takayuki might now dislike anyone trying to ride the cyberpunk wave, so she had come today hoping to confirm that for herself.