The game rules included ten bankruptcy bonuses per day, each giving 2,000 Happy Beans. These reset at midnight. New players also get a bonus of 10,000 beans when they first enter the game.
The exchange rate was 10.000 beans to 1 dollar. So with just 1 dollar, players could buy 10,000 beans. That was enough to play 20 rounds in the base mode, assuming average bets of 500 beans per round. Of course, if they played the "Blood Battle" mode, they'd probably lose everything in one go. And if they played Guangdong-style Mahjong with fan multipliers, going bankrupt in one round wasn't uncommon.
After realizing this, William added the "Push Win" mode. It didn't require much work—just a new icon and a few lines of code removed from the Blood Battle rules.
Happy Mahjong wasn't designed to drain players' beans quickly. First, it needed to build player engagement and keep them playing for at least an hour or two. That's usually when players are most hooked—and if they go bankrupt at that point, they're most likely to spend money.
If you force players to top up after just one round, barely anyone's going to pay.
To avoid any confusion, William posted a Weibo: "It's not that one."
Players who hadn't heard about Happy Mahjong wouldn't get it, but for those who already knew about the game, it was a sort of explanation.
Previously, Earth Games had announced they'd be releasing a paid game, and Happy Mahjong happened to be a game with in-app purchases. But in William's view, there was a difference between the two. Posting this Weibo also served as a bit of stealth marketing.
After the post went live, Happy Mahjong slowly started gaining traction. Some players who hadn't heard about the game found out through the comments, and soon the fanbase effect kicked in.
"Active user count is rising."
William didn't even need Cynthia to tell him—he already knew.
Whether this was good or bad was still unclear. The only thing for sure was that the game's popularity would keep climbing.
"Let's go with normal promotion now."
Since William had already unofficially promoted the game, there was no point in holding back anymore. They might as well follow a standard promotional plan to get more people aware of Happy Mahjong.
"Okay."
Cynthia didn't say much. Although William had changed the original launch strategy, he was still the boss. He had the final say. As a subordinate, her job was just to carry out the plan.
One drawback of the WeChat mini app platform was that users couldn't leave reviews.
The task series "The Ninth Art" required 100,000 positive reviews. The fact it hadn't been completed yet meant that mini app games didn't count, so they'd have to wait until the next non-exclusive game launched to complete it.
The rest of the tasks weren't urgent. After checking over the current task list, William tuned everything else out and went back to developing Happy Match Mania.
Technically, it was already in good enough shape to launch. But since Happy Mahjong had just come out, William didn't want the two games to fight for attention. He decided to wait a couple of days to polish it a bit more and give players some breathing room.
[Happy Mahjong active user count exceeds 1 million! Milestone unlocked!]
[Milestone reward: "Mahjong Skills (Beginner)"]
The first milestone was reached just two minutes after William posted on Weibo. "Mahjong Skills (Beginner)" was a basic guidebook that explained the rules and scoring systems of Mahjong in different regions.
Five minutes later—
Another milestone was unlocked. Active users reached five million. Reward: 5 Reputation Points.
A minute after that, the active user count doubled again, reaching ten million. Milestone unlocked: "Mahjong Skills (Intermediate)".
Three minutes later, Happy Mahjong reached over 49 million online players, with total cumulative users exceeding 50 million. This unlocked the fourth milestone: 10 Reputation Points.
At that point, the game went into maintenance mode.
"What happened?"
William looked at the chaos online. He couldn't even log into the Happy Mahjong mini app anymore—it just said "failed to connect to server."
That meant the game itself wasn't the issue. It was a problem on the WeChat Game side.
"The server bandwidth maxed out."
Cynthia held up her phone—Wu Xugang was on the other end of the call.
"Then tell them to expand it!"
William was speechless. Tencent had the best internet infrastructure in the world, and they still couldn't handle a 50-million-user online game? What a joke.
"They're working on it."
Cynthia put down the phone. The whole thing was now out of their hands. How well or how fast the problem could be fixed all depended on WeChat Games.
William, who originally just wanted to be a hands-off boss, finally realized he couldn't rely on others for something as critical as servers. If one day Earth Games and Tencent ended up as competitors, they could just shut down his servers, and when (or if) they'd reopen—he'd have no say at all.
So, William called Cynthia in and shared his thoughts. The best solution would be to either get a batch of servers directly from Tencent, or at least keep using their servers but have Earth Games manage them independently.
That way, unless there was a physical breakdown, no one could hold their servers hostage.
After hearing him out, Cynthia only had one question: "The plan sounds okay, but… do you even know how to run servers?"
"I can give it a shot."
William had drawn a "Server Tech (Beginner)" skill book from a Silver Chest before. He also personally set up the server used for the Journey demo, so it shouldn't be too hard.
Cynthia didn't doubt him. After this whole mess, she now understood how important servers were. If William said he could handle it, she figured he probably could. So she didn't ask more.
After leaving the office, Cynthia went to contact Wu Xugang again. Meanwhile, the rest of the studio kept working on Honor of Kings, mostly focusing on art. Chris and Claire were still in the learning phase.
About half an hour later, the emergency maintenance was done, and the servers were finally back online.
So far, less than one in ten million active players had actually spent any money in-game. That meant only a handful had made purchases—everyone else was still playing with the free welfare coins. Some might've even won big already.
Being able to lose tens of thousands of Happy Coins in just ten minutes takes real talent. But as long as they're willing to buy more coins, they're good players. William hoped more of them would turn out like that—ideally, all of them.
Unlike Jump Jump, which paid revenue share on a quarterly basis, Happy Mahjong did daily settlements. That meant however much people spent that day, WeChat Games had to hand over half the money to Earth Games. Whether that money actually came from real in-game purchases didn't really matter. As long as WeChat Games could keep their books balanced and Earth Games made money, it was a win-win.
Looks like the days of staying up to wait for the post-midnight earnings reports were back. William felt a bit excited thinking about it.
Still, Happy Mahjong wasn't nearly as profitable as traffic-sharing games, so even though he was excited, he kept his expectations low. It just felt familiar—that was all.
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