Chapter 142

Chapter 142

Though TeSTAR was doing well in Korea, our success was limited to our country of origin. Our WeTube views were inferior to all the groups that ranked above fifty in the music charts. This meant that we were lacking in popularity overseas compared to all the groups produced by larger agencies.

Us making the SongBoard chart would be absurd. Did he mean the SongBoard Global 200? I thought to myself that this might make sense, at least a little. But I was wrong.

“The Alternative Digital Song Sales... Chart?”

“Yes!”

I’d never heard of it. All of us instantly looked to Eugene, our resident native English speaker, but he looked just as puzzled as the rest of us.

“Oh! One second!” The manager rushed away to take a phone call from the agency before explaining anything.

Chaotic.

We went back to the waiting room, peppering Eugene with questions.

“Do you know anything about the chart he mentioned?”

“I know the Alternative Songs Chart... But not that one.”

Everyone’s faces showed confusion, but Raebin’s.

“That... alternative chart... What is it?”

“There’s only Alternative Rock music on it. I like it!” Eugene replied.

“Oh.”

Alternative rock was a genre of rock music, and the chart existed exclusively for that genre.

So if this chart is labeled as digital sales, maybe that means... it only measures the song’s sales? I looked up what kind of chart it was as soon as I located my phone. It was a detailed, minor chart that only had twenty-five place rankings.

Plus, it’s only for paying subscribers.

Raebin looked puzzled as he muttered beside me, “We don’t have any alternative rock title tracks...”

I checked an archived page from the search engine to see what the chart had looked like recently.

“Oh, is that it?” Big Sejin said, coming up beside me and scrolling down the screen.

“Hey!” I barked at him.

“Haha! A look at the other albums on here should tell us…”

We skimmed through it and found that TeSTAR’s album art was... nowhere to be seen.

Huh?

“Here it is!” Eugene’s hand was now encroaching on the sanctity of my phone screen. He swiped a few times and pointed to one specific song on the list.

[<127 Section> Bonus Book / TeSTAR]

“No way.”

“That’s the game collab song we did!”

Somehow, our song for 127 Section, the dreary game we’d collaborated with on our second album, had made it into the chart. I thought back to the way we’d dressed as the companion characters who were killed off in chapter one, as well as everything else.

“But this isn’t our album.”

Big Sejin was right. The album art was different. I searched out the track immediately on Seekify.

It’s from the game’s soundtrack album... We learned the details of the situation after the manager returned and explained everything to us in the van.

“A global launch for the game?”

“Yeah! And it went extremely well, apparently. Everyone loves it!”

127 Section had launched in English-speaking countries and turned out to be a hit.

The manager chuckled. “They put out a soundtrack album, and your song made it into the chart! But it only happened because the song was good, you see?”

“Really?”

“I-It’s a good thing, then!”

The members relaxed now that they understood what was going on. This was moderately good news.

So that’s why we got word of it on Sunday, which would have been odd normally. The SongBoard charts were updated on Wednesday. To be fair, our ranking on the charts was thanks to the game, not our own popularity. It wasn’t all that important to the agency or the fans, so it had probably taken a few days to trickle down to the manager’s level.

T1 must be happy about it, though. The small game studio they’d bought had hit it big. No doubt a whole lot of capital had gone into the project. This was good for us, too, since the soundtrack had sold well. The song itself was connected in a lot of ways to our album.

Maybe foreigners enjoyed it because it was all English except for the verses. It made a brief appearance in the lower ranks of a minor chart, but the news was still interesting and not at all unpleasant for us.

Shrugging, I put on my neck pillow. Then it hit me.

Still, it’s rather odd that a song from a game soundtrack made it into the chart. I’d assumed it was nothing spectacular since the chart was a minor one, but we weren’t talking about a movie soundtrack. The song belonged to a mobile game that had just launched. Also, I had no idea why it had been classified as alternative rock in the first place since it was just K-pop with rock elements.

That’s pretty strange. I needed to take a closer look at what was going on. Returning to my phone, I looked around a few gaming communities for the first time in a long while and was soon caught up to speed.

They used the TeSTAR comeback trailer for their game ad again. 127 Section had launched a WeTube and billboard advertising campaign for their global launch and had used our trailer.

It was a good-quality trailer. It had been almost worthy of cinema. I’d have used it again, too, if it had been up to me. As it happened, foreign audiences who saw the ad seemed to think that TeSTAR were simply paid actors playing the roles of the characters in the game.

We didn’t dance or sing in the video, after all. This was an understandable assumption that anyone who wasn’t a gamer interested in K-pop would likely come to. We weren’t recognized overseas the way VTIC was.

In any case, people liked the trailer... so the game studio had taken things a little further. The global version included part of the trailer on the download screen in the app itself. As a result, foreign users had gotten to experience the shock of seeing characters that appeared to be important to the story being killed off in chapter one.

Gaming streamers were now all uploading videos of their shocked reactions to finishing the first chapter. I looked them up, and some had hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of views.

[Never play 127 Section… NEVER!]

[MY FIRST TIME PLAYING 127 SECTION. (I hate it)]

The thumbnails included foreigners with headsets on crying or with their eyes bulging from their heads.

What a mess. Regardless, all this online coverage had put 127 Section on the radar. Its story and UI were extremely well received, and it was killing it so far in English-speaking countries.

The UI and the visuals do seem to be right up their alley. Apparently, the game was drawing comparisons to some famous indie games known for their high quality and immersive setting. There was even talk of it receiving Game of the Year awards already.

However, in contrast to the new boom in popularity in the global market, the Korean gaming communities were not happy about this.

I accessed an anonymous site first.

“Hmm...”

I can’t show them this. Ahyeon and Bae Sejin would probably pass out if they saw what was being said about us.

This is gross. I turned to a more civilized community that was a little less worked up. There were a few posts requesting moderation, showing lingering traces of a recent dispute.

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[Don’t use idols anymore to advertise. This needs to stop.]

: Maybe ads themselves are unavoidable. That’s just how things are done these days. But a game shouldn’t keep making people think about actual celebrities. I don’t want this to happen anymore.

Initially, I thought it’d be fine since the collab characters all died in the first chapter, but the game drops a ton of hints later that suggest they might be coming back. The idol connection seemed like it was fading these days, so I was coming to see them as just characters in the game when they started throwing the idols at us again in the global ads.

The foreigners don’t know the group, so that’s fine, but we’re not okay with it. I’m worried they might try something stupid again after the game’s recent global success.

Please, the global launch advertising was already too much.

(No hard feelings against the idol group mentioned.)

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- You’re right. It was fun in the beginning, and now it’s over. Don’t bring it back

- They needed the advertising at launch, so that sits okay with me, but now I’m worried. The domestic updates are slowing down... Ruins Factory, you’d better get your sh*t together

- This isn’t some dating sim for nerds. T1 took things a little too far trying to grow the studio after they purchased it.

└ But male idols in a dating sim...?

└ I was referring to games more geared toward female audiences.

└ Are you out of your mind? Female audiences don’t like it, either haha

- I liked it T_T Wasn’t the trailer great?

└ I liked the trailer, too. TeSTAR was fine in it. Everyone’s overreacting... There’s been no talk of any further collaboration.

└ We need to make sure they know we don’t want any more collabs before they attempt it. Clueless, much?

- Why has popular opinion suddenly changed so much? I thought everyone liked TeSTAR

└ That ended after a month. You need to do some catching up, LOL

└ Well, back then, there were plenty of players from that idol group’s fanbase haha

└ Saying that is a little malicious, to be honest. Everyone was excited after the launch, that’s all. The idols advertised the game in a lot of ways by doing the collab.

- I think it’s great they used the same video to advertise globally. It was intense and looked expensive as all hell. The foreigners’ fanart is really disgusting, though. I can live with the collab, but they’d better not keep that up

“Hmm.”

After reading through some posts and picking up on the general trend among the top posts, I had a good understanding of the situation.

The excitement has worn off. In other words, the collaboration had run out of gas. People had fallen in love with the idea at first since a new game put out by a nearly defunct game studio was getting a hefty investment and collaborating with a popular idol group. They’d wanted the game to be a hit more than anything else.

And the game itself turned out great, which also added to their excitement. The shock of seeing all the initial companions die had probably gotten the players even more worked up. This mood had probably lasted for a while since many TeSTAR fans had been drawn in by the advertising.

But the characters were now dead, and the TeSTAR fans felt no need to keep playing, so they quickly disappeared. Now that everyone knew how the initial companions died and more people simply played just because it was a successful mobile game, the gamers’ attitudes had returned to normal.

So they’re not interested in idols, huh? They didn’t want idols they weren’t interested in to be shoehorned into the game that they liked.

The game studio had seemingly continued to include hints about the companions with every update since people had liked them so much early on. With TeSTAR being in the recent global ads as well, I could understand why fans of the game were worried about another potential collab.

There’s only one thing to be done, then. We wouldn’t get involved again.

I locked my phone screen. It was fun to see our song on a SongBoard chart, but that was that.

Unsurprisingly, the agency approached us about it soon enough.

“Guys, how about another game collab—”

“No thanks. I don’t think so.”

“We need to prepare for our next album!”

“You guys?” The manager was taken aback by our immediate refusal.

I saw this coming and gave the members a heads-up.

“Th-the collab was f-fun, though...”

“Haha! You mean we should quit when we’re ahead, huh?”

Some of them had been disappointed, but they’d gone along with my suggestion regardless. My concern that we’d only be making trouble for ourselves had no doubt resonated with them. We had weathered controversies over Idol Inc. and the Rookie of the Year award recently. No doubt they were sick of people talking sh*t about them on the internet. And so, for the first time since the group’s inception, we refused a project proposal.

Maybe we’ve been acting like pushovers until now? The agency seemed taken aback and tried to convince us to change our minds a handful of times, but thanks to our recent successes, we were able to talk them down.

We were preparing a new album and for a festival in May when another suggestion was brought to us.

“A performance in the US?”

“Yes! This show is really popular nowadays! Its main audience is on WeTube, and though it’s not that large, its fanbase is dedicated...” The agency employee had been initially excited but then cleared his throat.

He seems cautious. That wasn’t a good sign.

“But uh... they want you to sing the game collab song.”

I should have known.