Over the past week, Lucas had a few meetings with NetDragon and SkyNova.
To sum it up in one word: dragging it out.
The other side showed interest in buying Nebula Games.
He had a talk with their representative to go over the details of the potential deal.
Judging from their offer and the terms they gave,
Lucas had a rough idea of what was going on.
They were interested—but not that serious about it.
After a few rounds of talks, they stopped reaching out to him altogether, which clearly meant they lost interest.
So, for now, that whole acquisition thing was off the table.
Meanwhile, the new version of Overcooked officially went live.
It had been about two and a half weeks since the game launched.
The main update this time was the release of the Workshop feature.
They also added some new official maps, themes, and recipe sets.
As soon as the new version dropped, players quickly noticed the update.
So they all rushed to download it.
"Huh? Overcooked got an update?!"
"It's free? New maps and levels, and wait—what's this Workshop thing? Isn't that usually DLC stuff? This is actually generous!"
"Just checked the patch notes—players can create their own levels now!"
"Whoa, that's crazy. I gotta try it out!"
Lots of players jumped in to update right away.
At the same time, there were plenty of discussions happening in Overcooked's community spaces.
The update caught everyone off guard.
Normally, content like this would be DLC, meaning you'd have to pay for it.
But this time, Overcooked gave everything away for free.
Plus, the game had only been out for just over two weeks.
Compared to the earlier buzz around all the "Friendship-ending Kitchen" memes, the hype had dipped a bit—but it was still going strong.
New players were still pouring in, as you could tell from the sales numbers and active users.
This game still has pretty long-lasting appeal, and the latest update really caught a lot of players by surprise.
After the update, many players interested in level design started trying out the Overcooked Workshop mode.
When designing the game, Lucas had already thought about letting players create their own levels later on.
So the creation tools were made to be very simple and easy to use.
In fact, Lucas could have fully built these tools into the main game from the start.
Just like that one game from his past life, known as Mario Maker.
Technically, it wouldn't have been a problem.
But in the end, Lucas didn't go that route.
The main reason was that Lucas wanted to use this to build up Nebula Games' community.
How do you keep players engaged even outside the game?
A solid game community is super important for that.
And after the new update for Overcooked, more and more players started joining the community.
During this time, quite a few players had already shared the levels they made.
But most of them were still pretty basic, mainly just small tweaks to the terrain.
They weren't all that impressive yet — you could tell they were missing that spark.
Lucas wasn't too worried though. As long as enough people keep making stuff, great maps will show up sooner or later.
And pretty quickly, the Workshop update really did spark a wave of creativity among players.
Even the ways people were "breaking up" with each other started getting more creative.
For example, some people made super annoying maps on purpose and sent them to their friends or partners to try.
In the Nebula Games Workshop community, tons of players were talking about the update.
"Insane! This update is wild!"
"Yeah! It really feels like there's so much more to do now!"
"Don't know if you noticed, but some creators even made levels that work really well for solo play!"
"Exactly! So good! I can finally cook on my own!"
"Overcooked, playing alone? Bro, that's rough!"
"Not gonna lie, I used to have someone to play with too... before I started playing solo."
As the Workshop update rolled out, Lucas checked out what players were saying online.
All the comments were positive.
But outside the player base, it didn't really make a big splash.
After all, it was just a version update.
But Lucas knew very well that this Workshop feature could seriously extend Overcooked's life.
How long exactly? That depends on the market and the players — not something he could control.
.........
In the weeks that followed, not much else happened, except the company's expansion.
They had already worked out a deal with the landlord upstairs and rented the whole floor.
Now it was just a matter of renovating the place.
On the hiring side, a lot of resumes had come in.
Lucas was already starting to think about the next phase.
Users and profit — those were his two main focuses moving forward.
But users came first.
Overcooked had given them a great start.
At the moment, Nebula Games had around 500,000 daily active users.
It was all thanks to Overcooked.
Because the workshop feature was open, at least in the short term, these users wouldn't leave too quickly.
But if Nebula Games didn't do anything new, they'd definitely lose players over time.
"Multiplayer games are good, but they're not suited for long development cycles. Besides, it's about time to start working on a real flagship title. We can't go in completely unprepared."
Sitting in front of his computer, Lucas already had a solid plan in mind for where Nebula Games was headed.
In the short term, they'd focus on short-cycle multiplayer games to help the platform grow quickly and attract more users.
At the same time, the whole team needed to start building experience for a real AAA game.
After all, if they wanted the platform to grow, they'd need at least one big, high-quality title to hold everything up.
Winning first prize in last year's game competition and then launching Outlast and Overcooked had greatly boosted Lucas's resume.
Even though there hadn't been an official promotion notice, his access to internal resources had increased by another 50%.
Developing a large-scale VR game was still tight on budget and resources.
But for PC, funding and resources were already pretty solid. Even the risks were all within a manageable range.
Right now, the main issue was the team's technical skills. That was something they had already considered during the development of Outlast.
Even for this round of hiring, the standards were much stricter than before.
Most of the new hires were required to have at least four years of relevant industry experience.
The goal was to make sure that, under his guidance and with the help of the official game engine, they could meet the demands of the project.
While Lucas was deep in thought about the future direction of Nebula Games—
There was a knock at the office door.
(End of The Chapter)
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