TeSTAR was doing well domestically, but that was strictly within Korea.
Even looking at YouTube views, there were times when we fell behind groups hovering around the top fifty on the digital charts.
In other words, compared to groups from other major agencies, our recognition overseas was still relatively low.
‘So why the hell is Billboard suddenly coming up?’
Did we make the World Albums chart?
That at least seemed somewhat realistic.
But no.
“Alternative Digital Song Sales Chart…?”
“Yeah!”
I’d never heard of it in my life.
Every single one of us reflexively turned toward Cha Eugene, the native English speaker.
Hmm.
He had the exact same expression as someone who had never heard of it in his life either.
“Ah! Hold on.”
The manager, who was supposed to explain it to us, received a call from the company and went running off again.
‘What a mess.’
We headed back to the waiting room on our own while directing questions at Cha Eugene.
“Do you happen to know that chart from earlier?”
“I know Alternative Songs Chart…. I don’t know that one.”
Everyone except Kim Raebin wore an ambiguous expression.
“What’s… that alternati… chart thing…?”
“It’s only Alternative Rock. I like it!”
“Ah.”
Apparently it was a type of rock genre.
It seemed to be one of those genre-specific charts.
‘Then if “digital sales” is attached to the end… does that mean it measures nothing but actual digital-track purchases?’
The moment I found my smartphone in the waiting room, I checked what kind of chart it actually was.
…It was an obscure sub-chart under a genre category that only displayed up to twenty-five places.
‘And it’s even for paid subscribers.’
Next to me, Kim Raebin muttered with an awkward look on his face.
“None of our title tracks are alternative rock…….”
First, I used a cached page from the search engine to check the previous chart.
“Oh, is that it?”
Big Sejin butted in and swiped rapidly down the screen.
“Hey.”
“Haha! You can probably tell just by looking at the albums here……?”
After scrolling through the list, TeSTAR’s album art was…
nowhere to be found.
“……?”
What?
“This one!”
Then Cha Eugene’s hand invaded my smartphone screen too.
He swiped around a few times and pointed at one song.
[<127 Section> Bonus book / TeSTAR]
“…!!”
“Whoa.”
“Our game song!”
That’s right.
It was the song from <127 Section>, that hopeless game we’d collaborated with when releasing our second album, that had entered the chart.
The memory of dressing up as companion characters who got massacred in Chapter 1 immediately came rushing back.
“But that’s not our album?”
Just as Big Sejin said, even the album art was different.
I immediately searched Spotify for the track.
‘…It’s a game OST album.’
Only after the manager came back and explained everything while we were traveling by car did the situation finally make sense.
“The game’s global launch?”
“Yeah! And apparently it did insanely well. They said it’s blowing up!”
<127 Section> had recently launched globally, with a particular focus on English-speaking markets, and apparently it had become a huge hit.
The manager chuckled.
“So they released an OST album too, and your song from it made the chart! Hey, doesn’t that mean it got on there because the song itself is good too~?”
“Right?”
“Th-That’s something to be happy about…!”
Once the members roughly understood what had happened, they smiled and relaxed.
It was moderately good news.
‘So that’s why we suddenly heard about it on a Sunday.’
As far as I knew, Billboard updated its charts on Wednesdays.
Strictly speaking, this wasn’t TeSTAR’s achievement.
It was the game’s.
It wasn’t a big or urgent matter for either the agency or the fans, so it made sense that it might’ve taken a few days for the news to filter down as far as our manager.
‘T1 must be thrilled.’
They’d gotten a major hit out of the small game company they’d acquired.
Of course, they’d poured an absurd amount of capital into it.
Anyway, if the OST was doing well, that was good for us too.
The song was strongly connected to our album, after all.
‘Maybe the fact that everything except the verses is in English helped.’
There wasn’t even a hint of us on the main charts, and we’d only flashed briefly near the bottom of that obscure chart, but it was still interesting and welcome news.
I shrugged and slipped on my neck pillow.
Then, suddenly, something felt off.
‘Even so, a game OST actually entered a chart…?’
I’d brushed it off because it was a minor chart, but could a game OST really make it onto Billboard at all?
It wasn’t a movie OST.
It was from a mobile game that had only just launched.
On top of that, I had no idea what criterion they had used to classify the song as alternative rock.
I’d thought of it as K-pop that simply borrowed some rock elements.
‘Something’s strange.’
I should find out what exactly happened.
For the first time in a very long while, I browsed gaming communities on my smartphone.
And I figured it out.
‘They reused TeSTAR’s comeback trailer as an ad for the game.’
It seemed <127 Section> had run overseas advertising on YouTube and electronic billboards to coincide with its global launch, and they’d made aggressive use of our trailer footage.
‘The quality was really good, after all.’
It had practically been cinematic-trailer quality.
I would’ve reused it too.
Anyway, the English-speaking foreigners who encountered the advertisement seemed to have assumed that TeSTAR, who appeared in the trailer, were simply actors portraying characters from the game.
‘We didn’t dance or sing. We just acted.’
If someone was a gaming enthusiast with no interest in K-pop, that was a perfectly reasonable assumption.
It wasn’t as if we had as much overseas recognition as VTIC.
In any case, when the trailer advertisement got a good response…
the game company took things one step further.
In the global version of the game, they even inserted portions of the trailer into the waiting screen shown while additional app data was downloading.
Thanks to that, overseas users naturally got to experience the spicy shock of ‘watching a bunch of guys who look like they’ll be important get massacred the instant Chapter 1 ends.’
And apparently uploading videos of themselves being traumatized after playing Chapter 1 was currently a trend among game streamers.
When I searched, I actually found videos with hundreds of thousands, even millions, of views.
[Never play 127 Section… NEVER!]
[MY FIRST TIME PLAYING 127 SECTION. (I hate it)]
The thumbnails featured foreigners wearing headsets as they cried, screamed, or opened their eyes so wide they looked ready to pop out.
‘This really is absolute chaos.’
In any case, riding on all that buzz, <127 Section> was receiving extremely positive reviews for its story and UI and was doing quite well in English-speaking markets……
That was the short version.
‘The game’s UI and visuals did seem like they’d appeal to that crowd.’
Apparently, it was already being compared to several famous indie games that had been praised for their artistic quality and worldbuilding.
People were even talking about GOTY already.
But unlike the booming global market, the Korean gaming community was a disaster zone because of all this.
First, if I searched the anonymous sites…….
“……Hmm.”
No.
This wouldn’t do.
The level of language here seemed like enough to make Seon Ahyeon or Bae Sejin faint if they saw it.
‘It’s kind of disgusting.’
So I found an extremely mild community instead, even if it was less lively.
Traces of arguments remained in several posts on the board where users submitted suggestions to the developers.
========================
[Let’s end the idol-based promotion here]
: Let’s say the advertising was unavoidable. That’s the trend these days, after all.
But constantly making us think of real celebrities while playing the game is another matter. I wish you’d stop doing that.
I thought it’d be fine because all those collaboration characters died in the first chapter, but you keep dropping hints about them, and there’s a pretty strong implication that they might show up again.
Recently, I’d finally managed to stop seeing the idols and just view them as characters from the game, but now the idols are appearing in the global advertising again.
Western fans don’t really know those idols, so it’s fine for them, but we do.
I’m worried that after seeing the global version succeed, you’re going to do something stupid again.
Please, let it end with the launch advertisements.
(I have no problem with the idols themselves.)
========================
-Agreed, I hope they don’t bring back something we enjoyed at launch and then moved on from
-I understood using them for the launch because they needed promotion, but now I’m getting worried too… Our domestic update schedule is getting longer as it is… Has Ruins Factory still not gotten its act together?
-This isn’t even some otaku game in the first place. T1 acquired them and forced the issue because they wanted to expand the scale.
└Male idols… in an otaku game?
└I meant a female-targeted otaku game.
└Are you insane? They hate it there too lol
-I liked itㅠㅠ Wasn’t the trailer cool?
└I liked the trailer too. TeSTAR was fine, I think everyone’s being way too sensitive… There hasn’t even been any word about another collaboration.
└We have to act like this now so they’ll read the room and not bring it back. Please understand the atmosphere.
-What happened here? Didn’t everyone used to call them GodSTAR?
└That phase ended in a month, what year are you living in… lol
└Hmm, there were an awful lot of that idol group’s fans here back then haha
└That sounds kind of malicious. Back then the game had just launched and everybody was excited and playing nonstop. The idols promoted all kinds of things for the collaboration too.
-Using that video for the global ads was intense and effective. You could tell they threw money at it. But when I look at Western fanart and recognize the idols it’s kind of gross. Still tolerable. Just don’t do it again.
Read only on MUGEX
“Hmm.”
After reading a few more posts and looking through the flow of the popular threads, I roughly understood.
‘They’ve cooled down completely.’
To put it crudely, the high had worn off.
At first, when capital and name recognition were poured into a new release from a game studio that might otherwise have failed, people had probably become rapidly favorable because of the thrill of that alone.
The immediate priority had been for the game to succeed.
‘And then when they opened it up, the actual product was genuinely good, so everyone got even more fired up.’
On top of that, all the initial companions died.
The shock factor must have intensified the excitement.
And because a lot of TeSTAR fans had been brought in by TeSTAR’s promotion, that atmosphere would’ve lasted for a while.
But the characters had died and exited the story.
Naturally, TeSTAR’s fans didn’t have much incentive to keep playing, so a lot of them would’ve dropped out quickly.
Once the massacre of the initial companions became common knowledge and the proportion of people joining because it was ‘a successful mobile game’ increased, the usual flow of things took over again.
‘Basically, they don’t care about idols.’
They were saying not to shove people they had no interest in, who felt out of place, into game content they liked.
And because the reaction to the initial companions had been so intense, it seemed the game company had continued sprinkling hints about them throughout the updated content.
Then TeSTAR showed up in advertising for the global version too, so I could understand why they were worried there might be another collaboration.
‘Then there’s only one answer.’
We simply shouldn’t get involved again.
I turned off my smartphone and settled the matter in my head.
Let’s leave it as an amusing incident where we unexpectedly saw the group’s name on Billboard.
And sure enough, not long afterward, the company began tentatively feeling us out.
“Guys, how would you feel about doing another game collaboration…….”
“No. I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“We’ve got to prepare our next album~”
“…?? Guys?”
Our clean refusal left the manager baffled.
‘I’d expected this, so I’d already gathered everyone and given them a short briefing.’
-Th-The collaboration was fun, though…….
-Haha, so you’re saying we should leave while everyone’s still applauding~
A few of them were disappointed, but they all accepted it in the end.
The point that doing it again would probably only make things exhausting seemed to have struck especially deep.
From <Idol Inc.> all the way through the Rookie Award controversy, simply becoming the subject of an online argument was understandably tiring by now.
And so, for the first time since decisions for the group had begun, we outright rejected a project.
‘Maybe we’ve been too obedient until now.’
The company regretted it and tried several times to persuade us, but TeSTAR’s recent results had been so strong that the group had gained considerable bargaining power, and the matter was eventually settled without incident.
Then, one day while we were juggling preparations for the new album with festival schedules in May…
another subject came up.
“A performance in America?”
“Yes! And it’s a program that’s been getting popular lately! It’s a little smaller because it’s mostly on YouTube, but it has a very clearly defined audience…….”
The company employee spoke excitedly, then gave a small cough.
‘…They’re watching our reaction?’
I had a bad feeling.
“But… uh, well, they’re asking you to perform the game collaboration song.”
Ah.
Of course.