With everything in place, Alto reached out to Ophelia straight away to begin distribution.
Beyond his own works, several designers on the development team had been quietly nursing ideas of their own, and as they came to him one by one for guidance, he worked through each project with them until it was ready. The releases went out together, and the trading company's catalog filled out considerably in a short span of time.
For distribution fees, Alto kept his cut deliberately modest, taking fifty percent and leaving the other half with the designers. That might have sounded steep, but the prevailing industry standard handed designers only thirty to forty percent, which meant Alto's terms were already an improvement. He could have gone further, but moving too fast would have caused real damage. The Moonstone distribution business supported a vast network of workers and livelihoods, and upending all of it at once would have created chaos he had no interest in causing. Better to move in small steps, giving other publishers room to adapt and follow rather than simply collapse under his new reforms. His direction was clear enough. Transform and keep up, or be left behind. In time, he would lower his share further, but there was no need to rush.
He was equally firm on quality. Any designer wanting to work with the trading company had to clear a strict review process. Crude, lazy, or entirely derivative work didn't make it through. Alto had committed to a premium strategy from the start, and he had no intention of easing that standard.
Helena, meanwhile, had started working on a game of her own, and the result surprised him.
It traced back, in an indirect way, to Plants vs. Zombies. After that top-down title became a hit, imitations had followed in numbers, most of them failing to capture what made the original work good. But the sandbox structure and overhead perspective had lodged themselves in Helena's imagination, and she had taken them somewhere unexpected. Rather than follow the Plants vs. Zombies formula, she had discarded it entirely and was building something that resembled the character-driven, monster-fighting, level-progression style of games Alto remembered from his old life.
He was genuinely impressed. Give her enough time, and something in the vein of those legendary breakout titles from a wilder era of game design might actually emerge. The ability to take an idea and run somewhere entirely new with it was the mark of a designer who had genuinely internalized the craft, not just absorbed it.
She was still in the early stages, of course. The framework existed, but a great deal remained unformed, so Alto made time in the gaps of his schedule to mentor her through it.
For his own part, he had been thinking about the longer road ahead. Action classics like Diablo sat waiting in the back of his mind, and beyond that, real-time strategy titles like Red Alert, Warcraft, and Age of Empires, all of which had once defined the experience of sitting down in a busy gaming venue. But those were future considerations. ARK remained the immediate priority, and everything else could wait its turn.
As the smaller titles went live, observant players were quick to notice.
"What's going on? Master Alto just released a whole set of new games at once."
"They look like smaller titles."
"Only a dozen Berries each? That's nothing. I'll grab two and see what they are."
Liar's Tavern drew its core inspiration from bluffing games Alto remembered from his old life, but the world's touch gave it its own shape. Players chose from a cast of animal characters and gathered inside a tavern setting to play cards or dice across several distinct modes.
In one mode, each player had a revolver loaded with a single bullet, and twenty cards divided between six Aces, six Kings, six Queens, and two wild jokers sat at the center of the table. The first player laid down a card and named it, and the next could either play along or call the bluff. Whoever lost the challenge had to point the revolver at themselves and pull the trigger. The game continued until one player remained.
Alongside that mode, Alto had worked in familiar card game rulesets, giving players enough variety that the mechanics never grew stale.
Once players understood how it worked, they had a hard time stopping.
"I play a Queen!"
A player with the pig character slapped a card onto the table.
"Two Queens," said the rabbit, following without hesitation.
"There are only six Queens in the deck. I've got three. There's no way you have two more. I'm calling it."
The bull flipped the cards.
"One Queen and one wild card."
"You lose."
The bull picked up the revolver, pressed it to his own head, and pulled the trigger with the calm of someone who had done the math.
"It's only the first round. The odds are still in my favor. I can come back from this—"
The shot rang out before he finished the sentence.
"HAHAHA! Again, again!"
Monopoly was a simpler experience by comparison, offering both multiplayer and solo modes. Players chose from four characters, Bane, Cyric, Talos, and Shar, then rolled dice to move across the board, racing to claim street blocks and raise structures until a full monopoly drove rents through the ceiling and left opponents scrambling. The stock market added another layer, with small early investments paying off dramatically once red or black cards came into play to shift prices at the right moment. Random events and a rotating item pool kept each session unpredictable.
It found a particular following among female players, who took to the chibi character designs and the sharp, memorable voice lines with obvious enthusiasm.
"Life rarely goes as planned!"
"I'll be laughing in my sleep tonight!"
"So greedy. So, so greedy."
Both games were priced low, played fast, and rewarded coming back for another round. Players who had spent hours deep in Liberty City or Stardew Valley started dropping into a few quick sessions to decompress before logging off. The catalog had found its rhythm.
Boshita was one of those players who had never quite found a reason to stop.
After Liberty City pulled him in, Stardew Valley followed, then Plants vs. Zombies. He had spent his entire holiday at home, moving between farming, fishing, and village conversations until exhaustion set in, then switching to something lighter until it didn't. He worked through each new release as it arrived, testing them all.
Good things never last, though.
"Milord, these two crates?"
Carson stared at the boxes in front of him, visibly confused.
"Those come with us. Everything in there is important, so pick them up carefully and don't let anything get damaged."
Boshita's holiday was over, and he was heading back to the Imperial Capital with considerably more luggage than he had arrived with. The crates held Moonstones and the newest login devices from Alto's trading company, packed with more care than most of his actual belongings.
As for why he was bringing so many?
He had things worth showing off to people who hadn't seen them yet.