The gaming world is abuzz with excitement after the highly anticipated action role-playing game (ARPG) “Black Myth: The “Wukong” was released at 10:00 a.m. of Tuesday.
Until 11:40 AM on Tuesday, it was at the top position on the hot play chart for Steam, a popular international digital distribution of video games and with 1.2 million simultaneous players around the globe.
The game is the creation of Game Science and is based on the Chinese novel that tells the story of a monk with three disciples; the main character of the story is Sun Wukong, which is also known as the Monkey King, who is also depicted as a supernatural being with a disposition for tricks.
This work is one of the most inspirational and influential in China and in the broader East Asian region. The backstage drama has been taken to the opera, television drama, the cinema, and now the video game.
It takes six years to develop a game, and the investment is no less than 400 million yuan (about $56 million). Such a large scale of financial investment places the game on the level of the first AAA title in China.
This global trend is actually evidence of China’s cultural penetration beyond the conventional media domain, and video games are now new cultural envoys of the country.
Various market analysts are expecting gigantic sales figures; on the low end, the numbers can reach 5 million copies, while on the high end, they can go as high as 10 million copies.
It could realize operational revenue of over 2.6 billion yuan without platform commissions. This figure shows the capacity of this game to grow to be one of the financial giants shortly.
Chinese cultural emblem
Domestically developed gaming products grossed 117 Yuan billion in overseas sales in 2023, following a four-year streak of 100 Yuan billion and upwards according to the Game Publishing Committee of the China Audio-video and Digital Publishing Association.
China with its fast integration of tradition and contemporary social networks is gradually becoming the world’s trendsetter in pop culture with a rather complex image, experts in communication sciences note.
“Black Myth: Wukong” is not the only major gaming title that will satisfy the gaming needy for Chinese culture this year.
Another game, the “Phantom Blade Zero,” promoted as the effective combination of the Chinese martial art and the fantastic motifs, is the product of Beijing S-Game.
Since June this year, its latest trailer has received over 1.4 million views on PlayStation’s official YouTube channel; the game’s world tour demo began back in June of this year through September.
Immersive game
In “Black Myth: Wukong, “the destined person” is born and the player is whisked into a dangerous mission to seek out the origins of the Monkey King.
This is a single game that, while based on the traditional Chinese novel Journey to the West, will have more turns than anyone can imagine.
Critical reaction has been positive; using the Metacritic method based on summaries of reviews from 52 world media outlets, the game was assigned a score of 82 points out of 100.
For example, the online gaming magazine IGN ranked the game as eight out of 10; in contrast, a Chinese gaming site gave it a score of 10 out of 10.
“Black Myth:” Wukong” has received appreciation due to its accurate visualization and realistic as well as impressive performance.
Fellow gaming outlet GamerSky credits this to the game’s use of Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) and Game Science pouring resources into art. In the production of the first AAA title businesslike approach and a great deal of care resulted in a polished final product.