Parallel World Game Developer

Chapter 9: Chapter #9: Fuck ’em!

A full month had passed since the game was unceremoniously pulled from the storefront.

By now, the internet’s notoriously short attention span had moved on.

There was practically zero discussion about Getting Over It on social media, and even Nexus’s hyper-polished clone, ’Ascent’, had faded into total irrelevancy.

For the executives at Nexus, when a trend died, it stayed dead.

’Getting Over It’ had been a low-budget indie game, and their clone had cost them practically nothing to produce.

Sure, they had issued a wave of refunds for the clone, but between the players who kept it and the whales who swiped their credit cards for premium microtransaction tools, the platform still turned a tidy profit.

As for the moral weight of deliberately sabotaging a rising star designer?

To a massive corporate entity, it wasn’t even a blip on the radar.

Their internal philosophy was brutally simple: If you can survive being smothered, then maybe you actually are a genius.

"Ethan, are you seriously letting me be the one to hit publish?" Marcus stared intently at the final release confirmation screen on the developer dashboard.

"Of course," Ethan smiled, leaning against the edge of the desk. "You’re the absolute number one employee of Sprout Studio."

Seeing the words Sprout Studio officially registered on the digital paperwork made Marcus swallow hard.

This was the first game he had ever truly worked on from the ground up!

He was so nervous he literally got up, jogged to the dorm bathroom, and scrubbed his hands raw.

When he returned to his computer chair, his expression was practically holy.

Ethan didn’t rush him.

His ambitions stretched far beyond just releasing a small indie game; he could afford to let his friend soak in the moment.

Marcus sat frozen in front of the monitor, desperately suppressing the adrenaline shaking his fingers.

He looked back over his shoulder at Ethan one last time.

Ethan gave him a firm, reassuring nod.

Click.

The mechanical snap of the mouse button was crisp.

The screen flickered for a fraction of a second, loading the data packet, before a clean green dialogue box popped up in the center of the monitor.

[Upload Successful!]

Seeing those two words made Marcus slump back in his chair, feeling as though his soul had just happily left his body.

Beside him, Ethan calmly pulled out his phone.

Even an absolute masterpiece needed marketing, and right now, social media was the only viable weapon he had to promote the new title.

He opened Twitter and checked the analytics on his developer account.

He had roughly five thousand followers under the alias ’Nova’.

Five thousand sounded decent on paper, but factoring in the algorithm, only a fraction of those people would actually see his timeline.

"Should we try to borrow some money for an ad push?" Marcus asked, finally noticing the very real bottleneck they were facing.

The intense, rapid-fire production cycle of Dead Cells had burned through nearly all the capital Ethan had managed to pull from his first game.

Ethan caught the worry in his roommate’s eyes and just laughed, effortlessly sweeping away the tension in the room.

As the boss of the studio, how could he lead his team if he was second-guessing his own momentum?

Furthermore, he didn’t need to hesitate.

He knew exactly what Dead Cells was capable of.

It was the perfect answer to the industry’s doubts.

He quickly drafted a new tweet.

Nova: Do you it’s really that simple to replace a game that I made?

Attached below the text was a single, high-resolution piece of promotional art.

In the background loomed a sprawling, intricately twisted gothic architecture—a massive castle on a mountain, a looming bell tower, and a glowing sky bleeding with the colors of a violent sunset.

In the foreground stood a lone warrior.

His head was a roaring mass of fiery, ethereal energy.

Arrows were brutally embedded in his back, his right arm dripped with crimson, and his left hand gripped a glowing, ice-blue cell pulsing with raw power.

[ DEAD CELLS ]

The moment the tweet went live, Ethan locked his phone and shoved it into his pocket.

"Let’s go. Dinner’s on me tonight," Ethan said, throwing an arm around Marcus’s shoulders.

"Bullshit," Marcus rolled his eyes, shoving him off. "You don’t even have twenty bucks to your name right now, how the hell are you treating me?"

"Why do you look down on your boss?" Ethan grinned. "Hey! Tonight, we are doing double sausages and double eggs in the instant ramen!"

"Screw you!" Marcus laughed, shaking his head as he followed Ethan out of the dorm room.

Staring at his roommate’s back as they walked down the hall, Marcus couldn’t help but ask himself the same question he had been wrestling with all month.

Where does he get the sheer, insane courage to go all-in like this?

Ding!

Live on the Surge platform, Silver was mid-stream, casually reviewing a batch of clunky student-made indie games.

None of them were giving him that familiar, anxiety-inducing heart palpitation he craved.

He was just starting to wonder if he secretly had a masochistic streak hardwired into his brain when the sharp notification bell interrupted his thoughts.

[xX_Sniper_Xx: wait was that the VIP push notification sound?]

[GamerDad88: CAUGHT IN 4K. who’s the e-girl you’re simping for silver?]

[LoreMaster: bro spill the tea immediately]

[PraiseTheSun_99: didn’t know you had premium alerts set up for models lmao]

The customized chime caught Silver completely off guard. He rarely ever used the ’Priority Alert’ feature on his phone.

But a month ago, he had made a single exception.

He had set an alert for a developer named ’Nova’.

"Screw off, chat! Do I look like the kind of guy who sets push alerts for Instagram models?" Silver scoffed, immediately snatching his phone off the desk. "The only person I set an alert for was the dev behind Getting Over It."

He leaned back in his ergonomic chair, staring at the locked screen. "I figured the kid had to be going through absolute hell. I set the alert just to see if he was ever going to break his silence and speak up."

"He got blacklisted. His game got ripped off, delisted, and he hasn’t made a single peep about it. I’ve been checking his page every day hoping for an update from him."

Silver unlocked his phone and tapped the Twitter notification.

He had been waiting for this moment for over thirty days.

He expected a massive twitlonger, a legal threat, or a tragic retirement announcement.

When he actually processed the contents of the tweet, Silver froze.

Sitting perfectly still in front of his live broadcast camera, his eyes widened in shock.

A solid thirty seconds of dead air passed.

BANG!

Silver slammed his fist down onto his desk with unprecedented, violent force. His mechanical keyboard physically bounced two inches into the air.

"Fuck!"

[VOD_Goblin: holy shit what made the monkey rage that hard?!]

[IndieFanatic: is there drama? did Daniel Fenn do something again?!]

[Salty_Tears: he hasn’t spoken in a month, he must have dropped a massive rant.]

Prompted by his reaction, thousands of viewers scrambled to open Twitter and find Nova’s page.

There was only a single new post.

A piece of gorgeous, breathtaking original art, accompanied by a wildly provocative caption.

[Do you it’s really that simple to replace a game that I made?]

When the chat saw the post, a collective silence washed over the broadcast.

For an entire month, everyone assumed Ethan Vale had been crushed by the corporate machine—oppressed into silence, unable to defend himself, too terrified of Titan Interactive’s shadow to fight back.

No one expected that he had spent the last thirty days quietly forging a brand-new weapon.

"I have never been this genuinely pissed off before!" Silver yelled, slapping his desk again.

"The whole corporate sabotage thing? That was infuriating on a human level. I would have been so relieved if he just came out today and blasted Nexus with a giant, angry rant."

Silver pointed aggressively at his monitor. "But he didn’t! He didn’t complain. He didn’t cry about it. He didn’t say a single damn word! He just put his head down, locked himself in a room, and built an entirely new game!"

He pulled the promotional art up onto the main stream overlay. "Look at this! Just looking at the cover art, you can instantly tell the pixel work and atmospheric design is infinitely more complex than ’Getting Over It’."

Silver leaned into the microphone, his voice dropping into a rare, deadly serious register.

"Guys, I’m mad because this dev purely loves the craft. He just wants to make us feel something. And that pure passion made him a target for a mega-corp that only views games as a quarterly earnings spreadsheet."

A slow, vicious smirk finally broke across Silver’s face.

"But thank God. He was smart enough this time." Silver tapped the screen. "He completely abandoned Nexus. He dropped this one straight on Steam."

"Fuck ’em!"

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