By eliminating the risk at its earliest stage, the AI chip burnout incident instead beca an excellent publicity opportunity for Gastar Electronic Entertainnt.
Gastar Electronic Entertainnt replaced the latest AI chips for players free of charge and also gave out vouchers that could be redeed for any ga.
Even consoles from unaffected, fully functional batches received a unified gift of video gas from Gastar Electronic Entertainnt.
In this world, the practice of giving away gas for free had not yet beco fully mainstream.
This was because Gastar Electronic Entertainnt completely dominated the electronic gaming platform market, making it extrely difficult for other companies to snatch custors from under its nose.
Even if other manufacturers wanted to give away gas for free, it would be hard to achieve the desired effect, so they simply abandoned the idea altogether.
Unless a ga had a history of ten or twenty years, it was rare to see it given away for free—even discounts as steep as 90% off were uncommon.
Gastar Electronic Entertainnt, however, was very generous, giving players several well-known titles from previous generations for free.
These included the first six installnts of Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy up to the seventh title, as well as Super Mario 1 and Super Mario 3, which were popular back in the FC (Famicom) era.
These gas would be distributed weekly over the course of the next year, and players could claim them for free through their accounts.
Both Gastar Electronic Entertainnt and the players were delighted.
This move to restore its reputation also saved Gastar Electronic Entertainnt tens of millions of dollars in marketing expenses.
Of course, that still wasn’t enough to fully offset the losses caused by the recall.
But the overwhelmingly positive player feedback made it all worthwhile.
After the incident passed, sales across Gastar Electronic Entertainnt’s major titles rose noticeably, with Cyberpunk 2077 seeing the largest increase.
This was because more people beca curious about what kind of ga could actually burn out a console.
Subconsciously, people believed that a ga capable of doing that must be exceptionally impressive.
And in reality, it truly was.
After scrapping one console, Kazuo Murakami took out a new one just minutes later and continued playing, seemingly without any fatigue at all.
He had already cleared the ga using seven different character backgrounds.
Although all seven paths led to the sa final ending for the protagonist, the gaplay experience was vastly different each ti, with every background offering its own unique enjoynt.
It felt as though he had played seven completely different gas.
Murakami suddenly felt that selling this ga for only 59 dollars was practically a loss.
A ga like this wouldn’t be overpriced even at two or three hundred dollars.
Of course, that was just a figure of speech—actually selling it at that price would scare off many players.
In Cyberpunk 2077, Takayuki placed special emphasis on strengthening the storyline of another major character, Jack, allowing players to form an emotional bond with him and experience a massive emotional shock when Jack died.
Takayuki also added more narrative depth to Adam Smasher, the final boss.
Different character backgrounds required different strategies when facing this final boss.
Later, Takayuki still felt it wasn’t enough. He simply told the team to let their imaginations run wild and co up with as many ways as possible to defeat Adam Smasher, giving players countless thods to resolve the final boss and discover endless fun.
And that was only part of the ga’s many details.
Carson had already beco a household na in Europe as a professional football ga esports player and had once won the final championship of the Gastar World Cup.
His favorite gas were naturally football gas, followed by fighting gas—because fighting gas were his wife’s favorite.
At first, neither of them paid much attention to Cyberpunk 2077.
But after Gastar Electronic Entertainnt’s public relations response to the crisis, both of them grew curious about the ga and decided to buy it and give it a try.
They soon discovered that this was far from a simple open-world ga.
In this ga, you could even beco an outstanding martial arts master or an underground football player.
The experience was genuinely interesting.
Gastar Electronic Entertainnt possessed the very best developnt teams, covering nearly every ga genre and boasting extensive developnt experience. When so many developers with diverse expertise ca together, the open-world ga they created was almost flawless.
It featured racing chanics comparable to Forza, first-person shooting on the level of Titanfall, and large-scale world design experience from teams that had worked on Grand Theft Auto. Going even further, it also included stock trading, managent, construction, tower defense, strategy gaplay, and more.
Both Carson and his wife felt that discovering this ga so late ant they had missed out on so much.
They should have tried it earlier.
In a family ho in a remote city, a middle-aged man in his fifties stared blankly at the screen, watching the final boss, Adam Smasher, lying on the ground and slowly dying.
"Dad? How was it? Exciting, right?" the young man beside him asked eagerly.
"So this is the video ga you’ve always loved? I really... I really didn’t expect this..."
For a mont, the middle-aged man didn’t know how to describe what he was feeling.
Ever since Cyberpunk 2077 was released, he and his child had sat down together every evening after work to play the ga.
They studied how to make money in the ga together and worked through side quests together.
As ti passed, the father-son relationship should have grown more distant—but because of this ga, their bond beca as close as it had been when the child was young.
Of course, neither of them consciously noticed this change. They were both completely imrsed in the captivating Night City.
In the ga’s dialogue, Night City is described as a place that srizes people, drawing countless individuals toward it and making them throw themselves in without hesitation.
That was exactly how they felt.
The entire ga experience was like personally living through an ultra-long, incredibly realistic movie.
And most importantly, this movie had an unmatched sense of imrsion—you were the protagonist, and every action you took affected the developnt of the city.
"Dad, this is top-tier gaming. I’d even dare say that after this ga’s release, it might take many years before another ga can surpass its scale and charm."
"The best ga? It really is a bit too good. Even now, I still haven’t fully recovered from it."
Early on, Jack’s death deeply shook the middle-aged man.
Over his fifty-plus years of life, he had experienced far more than his child.
He had once witnessed a coworker die right in front of him—a coworker who had also been a good friend.
When he watched Jack die in the ga, he subconsciously thought of that old friend. As Jack’s eyes on the screen gradually beca empty, it felt as though he had returned to that mont of watching his coworker die.
An indescribable sorrow filled his mind.
And imdiately afterward ca anger.
In the past, he had believed that movies, gas, television, and animation were rely entertainnt—unreal things that could never truly move him. At most, they had only caused fleeting emotions.
But Cyberpunk 2077 was different.
This kind of first-hand, lived-in imrsion was simply too intense.
The emotional impact was overwhelming.
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