"How much did you make today?"
"Not much. I had more classes than usual, so I couldn't walk around much. Even then, I still made forty-eight yuan. That covers tomorrow's food."
"Forty-eight? That's nothing. I heard a second-year photography student from the art academy made three hundred in one day through Northstar's event. Three hundred a day! That's almost ten thousand a month. He takes pictures, walks around, plays games, and somehow earns more than some office workers. Isn't that insane?"
"Well, if you were willing to move around more, you could probably make that much too."
"Then let's go out tonight. West campus?"
"What about football?"
"Football? Forget football. Catching Pokémon matters more now."
That kind of conversation was happening everywhere.
On campus benches. In student dorms. In cafeteria lines. In group chats. In late-night calls between classmates who should have been sleeping but were instead checking spawn timers and comparing routes.
At the same time, the internet had completely lost its mind.
Posts were flooding across the Official Blog, school forums, video sites, and message boards.
#Pokémon Go sparks a campus craze! Northstar Games expands testing to more universities, with internal beta users now exceeding forty thousand!
#Someone offers 30,000 cash for the first Pikachu! Could Pokémon Go become Northstar's most profitable game yet?
#The first Pikachu trainer refuses all trades. Just how low is the real spawn rate?
#Daniel Reed, chief programmer of Pokémon Go, says the game will launch as soon as possible and eventually reach every city, county, and village!
#Will Pokémon Go become the first domestic augmented reality mobile game to go truly global?
Every platform was talking about it.
The pilot program in several universities had already created a storm, and that storm had started to turn into real pressure for Northstar Games.
Ever since the success of Stardew Valley, the company had rarely felt cornered. It had grown too fast, too smoothly, and too confidently. But now, the scale of the attention surrounding Pokémon Go was so massive that even Northstar, one of the hottest game companies in the country, could not ignore the weight of it.
What surprised them even more was how quickly overseas players reacted.
The moment foreign users learned that China already had a real-world Pokémon game in testing, they went crazy.
Pokémon already had a massive fanbase overseas. Add in the social nature of the game, the real-world movement system, and the dream of seeing Pokémon appear through your phone in actual city streets, and the excitement exploded. Players overseas started begging Northstar to hurry up, finish development, and launch the game in their countries as soon as possible.
Some people even began proudly calling themselves "Northstar fans."
The most ridiculous case came from the so-called Land of the Free.
A gubernatorial candidate in one state, wanting to attract younger voters, actually mentioned Pokémon Go in a campaign speech. He openly said that if elected, he would work to communicate with Northstar Games and push for the game to launch locally as soon as possible.
And somehow, it worked.
Young people loved it.
Ethan Reed stared at the report when he first saw it and could only rub his forehead.
A governor's race.
A serious political campaign.
And someone was using Pokémon as a speech point.
It sounded absurd.
Then again… this was America.
This was a place where bizarre headlines appeared so often that people barely reacted anymore. Gunfights made the news like daily weather reports. There had even been stories about animals becoming honorary mayors in small towns. Compared to that, a politician promising to bring Pokémon Go to local players almost sounded normal.
Almost.
Even so, Ethan still couldn't understand how their brains worked.
While Northstar itself remained calm on the surface, Baidu Maps was practically celebrating in private.
Before this project, overseas map collection had always been sensitive. Large public zones were manageable, but once it came to detailed alleys, smaller roads, or special local areas, they had to tread carefully to avoid disputes or trouble with local authorities. Now the situation had completely changed. With Northstar's international popularity exploding and new local partners willing to cooperate, map expansion and data collection were proceeding far more smoothly than before.
Cities that had not been properly updated in years were suddenly getting new data. Streets, side roads, hidden lanes—everything was being cleaned up and refreshed.
If Baidu had to summarize its feelings in one sentence, it would be simple:
Northstar Games, you are a miracle.
But praise did not solve the real problem.
The truth was that both domestic and overseas attention had locked onto Northstar at the same time, and the company was now carrying a level of pressure unlike anything it had handled before.
Pokémon Go itself was not a huge game in size. Its basic design was actually simple. It was built around collection, movement, social interaction, and light battle systems. Gyms, captures, and trainer interactions were not the biggest strain on the company.
The real burden was the one thing players would notice instantly if it failed:
positioning accuracy.
That was the heart of the whole project.
If the map failed, if the spawn points felt wrong, if the game sent players to the wrong location, then the fantasy collapsed. Pokémon Go only worked because it blurred the line between the game world and the real one. It encouraged players to walk, explore, and physically move through their environment. That meant location systems had to be reliable, and reliable at a national scale.
That was where the server pressure became terrifying.
As a social game, Pokémon Go needed a shared environment. Ideally, all domestic players would be able to experience the same overall ecosystem. Ethan Reed had even toyed with a more ambitious dream—linking all of Asia into one connected system, letting entire regions share special events, interactions, and perhaps even future cross-border competitions.
The idea sounded thrilling.
It also sounded completely insane.
Just supporting one nation at full scale was already giving Northstar a headache. Linking multiple countries and continents into one smooth experience was still a fantasy for the future.
For now, that dream remained exactly what it was—a dream.
So Northstar kept spending.
Not cautiously. Not reluctantly.
Aggressively.
Servers were being expanded. Hardware was being upgraded. Technical teams were working overtime. And fortunately, money itself was not the problem.
Both Ethan Reed and Vivian Frost had more than enough capital to keep the project breathing.
Their combined liquid funds had already crossed five billion yuan, which was a frightening number for two people whose total age barely reached fifty. In a country where cash flow was tightly managed, that kind of liquidity was no joke. Plenty of companies had giant valuations and massive assets, but only a small fraction of that existed as usable cash.
This was the power of the internet industry.
And Northstar, as one of the most successful game companies in the country, had reached that level naturally.
So the company's greatest enemy was not money.
It was time.
And technical execution.
Day by day, the pressure continued.
Then August arrived.
And with August came a series of important changes.
The first was Vivian Frost's return to the company.
After spending enough time enjoying herself and running around catching Pokémon, she finally remembered that she technically held a leadership position. So she came back—at least in theory—to resume her duties.
In practice, she returned to being the company's beloved mascot.
Still, Ethan considered it an improvement. At the very least, he no longer had to call her at night only to hear her complain that he was interrupting her hunt for rare Pokémon. And perhaps more importantly, he no longer had to sit alone in an empty house wondering whether his business partner had fully transformed into a roaming trainer.
The second major event came with Overwatch's official overseas rollout.
After two months of preparation and back-and-forth negotiations, the game was now fully launched abroad. With that, Ethan handed the full operation of Overwatch to Evan Cross.
Evan moved from the sixth floor to the eighth, officially becoming the top executive in charge of the Overwatch division. Meanwhile, Lucas Frost took over Evan's old responsibilities, now managing titles like Stardew Valley, Pokémon, and Street Fighter.
This was an important shift.
Overwatch was not a short project. It was a long campaign, a living service game that required focused attention over time. From that point on, Evan would be dedicated only to Overwatch. Ethan had no intention of dragging people from that department to rescue other projects, no matter how difficult Pokémon Go became.
Even if problems appeared, he would rather hire outside teams and spend more money than damage the long-term structure of the company for short-term relief.
That kind of thinking was how smart companies avoided stupid mistakes.
From the outside, Overwatch looked like a gold mine.
From the inside, Ethan understood the truth more clearly.
Its direct game revenue was actually not outrageous. A battle pass model paid salaries and covered expenses, but it was not where the real fortune would come from. The real money in an esports game would eventually come from licensing, sponsorships, partnerships, league rights, and regional broadcast deals.
If Ethan had wanted fast profit, he could have copied older models and sold the game outright for a high price.
He never did.
From the beginning, Overwatch had been free.
That decision meant slower returns from the game itself, but it opened the door to something bigger. A healthy competitive ecosystem could earn far more in the long run than a one-time box price ever could.
And while Overwatch was stabilizing, Daniel Reed finally completed the last major improvements for Pokémon Go.
When the report landed on Ethan's desk, he read through it carefully.
Then he made the decision.
Pokémon Go would launch on August 6.
It was the perfect date.
Summer vacation was still underway. Students had time. Parks and university towns were active. The timing aligned perfectly with the game's strongest audience.
As for office workers, they could play too.
That was the beauty of a mobile collection game. It did not need to consume a player's life. Commutes, breaks, evening walks, the trip home—those small windows of time were enough. Ethan had always believed that if Pokémon Go became as exhausting as a full-time job, then the failure would belong to the designer, not the players.
Because in reality, especially in China, people did not have endless free time.
The fantasy of "nine to five" barely existed.
Most workers were lucky if they left by nine at night.
That reality shaped the game's entire structure. Pokémon Go was designed to reduce burden, not increase it. Daily tasks could be completed in about half an hour. A simple walk, a little exploration, a short trip around your neighborhood—that was enough.
Events would be scheduled around holidays whenever possible.
And there would be many events.
Large events. Small events. Social events. Regional events.
Ethan had already prepared more than what the original framework ever offered. He added ideas that fit local players better—family leagues, broader trainer systems, region-linked competitions, and Gym progressions that felt more exciting in a community-driven environment.
He had no interest in blindly pleasing overseas preferences.
This version of Pokémon Go was built first and foremost for Chinese players.
Foreign players could adapt.
On August 2, Northstar Games began official promotion.
That afternoon, the company released a polished video titled:
"Pokémon: Go — Become a Real-Life Pokémon Trainer!"
The video was short, sharp, and powerful.
AR Pokémon appeared across mountains, cities, villages, streets, malls, and universities. Office workers in suits, schoolchildren, students with books, tired commuters, and designers heading home all appeared in quick, vivid shots. A huge flying Pokémon cast a shadow over a crowded square, and in response, countless trainers raised Poké Balls toward the sky in a burst of reflected white light.
The caption said it all:
No matter who you are, you can become a trainer.
At the end, a Poké Ball flew across the skyline and dropped into Ethan Reed's hand. He turned, lifted the ball, and as white light flashed, the Northstar logo filled the screen.
The internet exploded.
Then came August 3, with the current Pokédex reveal.
August 4, with the first major event announcement.
August 5, with rare spawn details and special region-based information.
And finally—
August 6 arrived.
Northstar posted nothing new that day.
It did not need to.
Because on that day, the country itself became the announcement.
When a game stepped into real life… when reality fused with gameplay… the result was impossible to ignore.
The streets were full.
It was mid-summer vacation, yet it felt like a national holiday.
Parks overflowed with people.
Shopping malls were packed.
University towns were alive from morning until night.
Scenic areas, sidewalks, plazas, bus stops—everywhere you looked, people were outside, phones in hand, searching, laughing, moving, pointing, chasing.
Northstar Games had started a trend that spilled out of screens and into the real world.
For that one day, it felt like the whole country had become a giant playground.
The trainers had stepped onto the streets.
--------------------------------------------------
Extra Chapters Available on Patreon Upto 100
Catch up now [patreon.com/Samurai492 ]"
Discount code:F3D61 It will beavailable for few days only grab it !!!
__________________________________