When was the last time a Chinese-developed video game created a global stir as boisterous as the launch of “Black Myth: Wukong”?
The noise is mostly plaudits for the quality of the game’s action, design and playability, which has been amplified by Chinese state media. But that has been dampened somewhat by clumsy censorship and attempts to sweep aside allegations of sexism at the company that developed “Wukong.”
In its review, U.K. newspaper The Guardian described the game as having “fluid-feeling combat” and boasting “stunning visuals, cinematic beauty and a refreshing sense of speed.” It also summed up “Wukong” as “the summer’s most exciting and most controversial video game.”
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The single-player game puts gamers in the role of the Monkey King, or Sun Wukong, a key character from “Journey to the West,” a 16th-century Chinese novel that has been retold in literally hundreds of films, TV shows and cartoons. It sets the Monkey King on a 15-hour journey to defeat an array of monsters that threaten the world.
After a heady buildup that included 10 million views of the trailer on YouTube outside China and a further 56 million on Chinese video platform Bilibili, the game claimed more than 1.04 million concurrent players on gaming platform Steam within an hour of its Tuesday official upload. By Wednesday, that figure had risen to 2.2 million.
That kind of international success was not missed by China’s gamers or social media followers. More than 1.7 billion references to “Wukong” had been accumulated on the Weibo microblogging platform.
Chinese state media was just as quick to celebrate the game’s successful debut as a triumph for Chinese culture and technological progress. “‘Wukong’ exemplifies the growing maturity of China’s gaming sector and integrated resource capabilities of Chinese producers,” said the state-backed tabloid Global Times.
“This release marks a bold foray by Chinese game developers into a market long dominated by Western triple-A titles. With this breakthrough, the default language of a triple-A game is no longer English, but Chinese,” the official Xinhua news agency wrote in an editorial on Wednesday, translated by Reuters.
Triple-A or AAA is an unofficial label that describes big-budget games that are thoroughly developed and released by major companies. The production cost of “Wukong” has been reported as around $50 million.
“Wukong” was hatched by Game Science, a Tencent-backed startup that had not previously produced a PC and console game, with its marketing handled by (20% owner) Hero Games.
Where most Chinese gaming is done via smartphones, and to a lesser extent personal computers, the initial release of “Wukong” is limited to the Sony PlayStation 5 and to PCs (via platforms Steam, Epic Games and Tencent’s WeGame).
Moreover, it sells as a one-time purchase of RMB268 ($37) for the standard version and RMB328 ($46) for a premium edition, rather than the typical Chinese “freemium” model, where a product is made available for free or little cost, but users then make multiple in-game micro-payments for benefits such as personalization and game powers or early access to new tiers and upgrades.
But the criticism is not of the game’s source material, design or entertainment value. Detractors have aimed their fire at Game Science and at the kind of censorship of discussion that is commonplace in China, but sits less comfortably in the west.
U.S.-based games and entertainment publication IGN last year published a report exposing instances of sexist behavior by multiple Game Science developers, misogynistic social media posts by founder and CEO Feng Ji and Yang Qi, the game’s artistic director, as well as the inclusion of sexual innuendo in the firm’s 2015 recruitment advertising materials. While the new product was being opened up for review by western media, the company’s refusal to comment on the executive’s moral values sparked the first signs of controversy — albeit mostly outside China. Game Science has still not made any comment on the allegations.
That grew along with anticipation that the game was on course to be a blockbuster. On Steam, discussion boards outside China were peppered with largely-unrelated criticism of the Chinese government and its president. Some of the comments appeared to come from inside China from users who would only have had access by using an (illegal) virtual private network.
In advance of the game’s launch, Hero Games invited overseas reviewers and selected players to preview the game, but it also required them to sign up to a set of guidelines, which some took as an request that they self-censor.
The guidelines appeared to reveal many of the current red lines in Chinese society. “The list of forbidden subjects laid out in a document under ‘Don’ts’ — politics, ‘feminist propaganda,’ COVID-19, China’s video game industry policies and other content that instigates negative discourse,” reports the New York Times.
The reference to the state of China’s games industry is telling. Fearing accelerating myopia, gaming addiction, excessive idolization of star players and in-game gambling, regulators have deliberately crimped China’s domestic games industry and its leading companies over the past three or so years. To do this, they withheld licenses, delayed permits for commercial exploitation and added new regulations such as those that limit minors to just a few hours of game play per week and even less on school days.
The clampdown now appears to have eased and games approvals have increased this year, which make the arrival of a Chinese-developed AAA hit a further piece of positive news.
For some of China’s beleaguered tech and entertainment companies, the “’Wukong’ effect’s” impact on their valuation may allow them to see past the game’s overseas controversies. Hero Games owner Zhejiang Publishing saw its shares climb by their daily limit on Tuesday to reach a three-year high. CITIC Press, which is expected to publish a book of “Wukong” illustrations, was up by 20%. Tencent, the industry leader which earlier this month also reported some rebound in its Chinese games segment, held firm but its stock price was little changed.
The Global Times reports that private sector film company Huayi Brothers, which has endured a torrid period weighed down by debts and poor performance, may be the biggest winner on paper. Huayi recently disclosed that it holds 5% of Hero Games’ equity and, in turn, has seen its own share price climb by more than 70% since Aug. 14.
With the sexism and censorship controversies unlikely to have much impact inside China, Game Science and other Chinese developers are expected to continue trying their hand at developing other AAA games.
As investment bank Goldman Sachs wrote in a recent note, “We see signs that the government is recognizing the industry’s potential value for exports and culture, not least of which was the interview of Game Science’s founder by state media Xinhua agency ahead of its game launch.”
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