The Mech Touch novel Chapter 217

Ves left the job of establishing contact to his publicist. Gavin worked efficiently and contacted the Fireflies for a sponsorship offer.

To Gavin’s surprise, Jarle expressed interest in obtaining a custom virtual mech. That left the door open to negotiations, which Gavin and Jarle’s agent quickly hammered out.

Since the deal did not require much formality, the two sides came to a simple understanding.

In absolute terms, Ves provided Jarle with an exclusive customized virtual DarkSpear. He’d design the unique machine after a talk with Jarle over the comm and after he received a list of specifications.

Since they wanted to get this done as quickly as possible before the new duelling season began, Ves would not take more than a few days to complete the custom design.

Once Ves had done his part, Jarle would pilot his custom job and promote the DarkSpear model for a certain number of hours per week. The mech athlete and streamer would continue to pimp the DarkSpear model for a month.

The actual contract looked a lot more complicated, but put simply, Ves got his first spokesperson for the huge and largely untapped Bentheim market.

Gavin visited the workshop to brief Ves on the contract and get him to sign a few documents. He also had a lot of questions about the deal.

"Isn’t it premature to expand your brand presence in Bentheim? I thought we already agreed on our marketing strategy. Diverting too much attention on the virtual market makes no sense. The real and virtual markets are too different from each other. Even if you spend a lot of effort on your virtual models, your actual earnings won’t increase by all that much."

Ves understood Gavin’s doubts, but he had to grow his ability to earn lots of DP. "I don’t entirely agree with you on that point. Marcella tells me that many of my customers who bought the Mark II became convinced of its craftsmanship after trying out some of my virtual models. In addition, higher sales figures of my virtual product lines will also translate to confidence in the quality of my real mechs."

"It will be a blip in the ocean. Jarle is hardly the most popular celebrity from Bentheim. Without a constant media presence, your brand will quickly fall into obscurity."

His words rang true. As the local mecca of mech production and export, Bentheim was saturated with thousands of brands. At the LMC’s current scale, it had no hopes of competing with these long-established household names.

Still, Ves didn’t need to put in a lot of effort to cobble up a custom virtual DarkSpear, and he got plenty of short-term benefits out of the weeks-long promotion. As long as his sales for his latest virtual mech surpassed ten thousand units, he’d earn 100,000 DP in total. Ves needed the huge sum to shore up his skills and attributes to design a decent original mech.

Despite Gavin’s skepticism, Ves still went through with his plans. Before Gavin left, he wanted to ask a question that had been burning in his mind for a while.

"Boss? I’d like you to clear something up for me."

"Yes?"

"Well, it’s like this. I’ve been analyzing the sales patterns of your virtual mechs and compared them to your peers. One pattern happened to stand out like a sore thumb. Your customer retention is off the charts. Anyone who buys one of your virtual mechs is several times more likely to buy another mech designed by you. This usually doesn’t happen to newcomers in the market."

Consumers never really paid attention to the mech designer when they purchased a product from the low-end of the virtual market. They only cared about specs and their personal feelings about the mech.

Most mech designers who started out wished to make a name for themselves and their businesses. A mech manufacturer with a steady amount of repeat customers would never have to worry about missing their sales targets as long as they didn’t screw up.

"I’ve focused a lot on improving the piloting experience." Ves answered simply. "I’m guessing that my customers have caught on its benefits. I’m sure you’ve found that out yourself when you asked around."

"It’s beyond that. Some of your customers are oddly attached to their mechs, to the point where they treat them as affectionately as pets. I’m rather concerned because this effect is very pronounced in certain cases. It reminds me of the Farund Affair."

"Heavens no!" Ves immediately denied. "I haven’t messed around with the neural interfaces. This is nothing like the Farund Affair."

The Farund Affair stood out as the first and only case where a company managed to brainwash its customers with its virtual mechs. Back then, the simulator pod manufacturers competed against each other on how well they could make their simulations come to life. They all increased the intensity of their neural interfaces with each new generation of pods.

This uncontrolled growth of neural intensity led to some companies taking advantage of this phenomenon by messing around with the neural interfaces of their mechs. Most tried to be subtle and added a minor addictive element to their interfaces. For a couple of years, these shady companies saw steady growth as their models grew in popularity.

Farund Inc. obviously didn’t get the message. Its brash CEO jacked up all of the settings to the maximum. In the short term, his company rose like a rocket as sales ballooned almost exponentially. It became a major sensation in the virtual market as its models became increasingly dominant in the mech simulator games of that time.

Sadly for Farund, the good times didn’t last together. A few mech designers got suspicious and started poking around at Farund’s many designs. Their actual specs were nothing special, but each test pilot became instant converts the moment they piloted the virtual mechs.

The horrifying consequences of Farund’s mechs finally came to light when researchers found out about the tampered neural interfaces. The scandal ruined the company overnight and the MTA arrested all of its executives and mech designers. They only took a week to sentence them to death.

Even then, many of its victims required years of therapy in order to wean off the urge to pilot any of Farund’s mechs. A million or so of its most devoted fans had played with the virtual mechs for so long that their condition became practically incurable. The MTA took them all in and nobody had ever heard from them again.

These days, virtual mechs received much closer scrutiny. Iron Spirit certified every virtual mech submitted to its marketplace and they often flatly refused any mech that included non-standard neural interfaces. In addition, manufacturers of simulator pods cleaned up their act and pulled back some of their most extreme innovations.