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As the saying goes: the strength of a horse is proven over a long journey, and the character of a person is revealed over time.
And certain other things were also revealed over time. Specifically, consequences.
The sun was high. Another beautiful day. Max looked at it briefly and returned to his desk, because there was work to do and beauty was not going to pay for anything.
He needed to make money.
This was a new consideration. Before Jasmine, money had been an abstract concern — enough for now, figure out later. Now it was concrete. Jasmine still had a healthy amount of savings from her military discharge, but Max's sense of personal responsibility had opinions about touching that, and those opinions were firm. He was not going to be the person in this situation who lived on someone else's reserves while telling himself it was temporary.
Moreover, game promotion cost money. The Capital Exhibition cost money. Copyright registration cost money. A game platform — which he was going to need eventually if he wanted to stop being at the mercy of third-party infrastructure — cost significant money.
New games were not the answer right now. Holy Grail War was in the middle of its momentum, and the National Competition was ongoing. Splitting his attention between two development projects would hurt both.
Which left one clear path: cosmetic content.
Costumes. Spirit Origin sets, as the FGO-adjacent player base would call them. Holy Grail War had already shipped several, and there were more waiting — outfit variants that could be packaged and sold as premium content without touching the core game balance. Straightforward, proven, low-disruption revenue.
He pulled up his design files and started going through what was available.
Some of the Craft Essence artwork had outfit variants that were considerably more — expressive. Max looked at these for a moment.
Dangerous Beast. Sweet Frosting. A few others in that category.
He closed those folders with the resigned air of someone making a principled decision on behalf of the player community.
Those would stay in the personal archive. Releasing them into the wild would be irresponsible. Players needed to have energy for the game. You couldn't expect people to function properly if you just unleashed that kind of content into the ecosystem without warning. It was practically a public health consideration.
He was, really, thinking of everyone.
Beyond cosmetics, the platform question needed a timeline. Currently he was operating through the National Competition's official infrastructure, which was fine for now but had a ceiling — if he wanted to release future games without intermediaries taking cuts and setting conditions, he needed his own distribution layer. Not urgent today. But it needed to go on the roadmap.
Also on the list: promotional video for the Capital Exhibition, merchandise for the exhibition floor. Replica Noble Phantasm props, figures, plush versions of the more popular characters, badges at minimum. The kind of physical touchpoints that made an exhibition booth feel like a destination rather than just a display.
And cosplay. He'd been thinking about having Jasmine represent one of the characters at the exhibition — she had the build for several of them in ways that were immediately obvious to anyone who'd seen the character designs. The candidates narrowed quickly: Barghest was DLC content he hadn't released yet, and the other obvious option was a character whose power level made her canonical appearance in a normal Holy Grail War essentially impossible.
So cosplay remained an open question.
The copyright registrations also needed to happen before the exhibition. If Holy Grail War was about to get significantly more visible — which the current trajectory suggested — then having the IP formally protected was no longer optional.
Max leaned back and looked at the list.
A lot of things. All of them manageable. The future was genuinely bright, which was a sentence he hadn't been able to say with confidence six months ago.
He pulled out his phone for a quick break, opened the social feed.
The trending topics loaded.
He went still.
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