From "God of War" to "Black Myth: Wukong", a game startup's ten years of courage

From "God of War" to "Black Myth: Wukong", what we see is not only the growth process of a startup team, but also the epitome of the Chinese game industry's transition from follower to leader. This game, like its inspiration "Wukong Biography", breaks the tradition and allows the world to re-recognize the charm of Chinese culture in a brand new way.

24 years ago, Zeng Yu, who had just graduated from Xiamen University, began to serialize "The Legend of Wukong" on Sina.com Jin Yong Inn under the pen name Jin Hezai. He was 23 years old that year. He later said that he didn't know what he would write, but just sat in front of the computer, thinking and writing.

Later, "The Legend of Sun Wukong" was regarded as the ancestor of online novels and one of the earliest works to deconstruct "Journey to the West".

Later, the world view of "The Legend of Wukong" was extended to the game "Douluo Dalu".

This is an MMO online game launched by Tencent in 2014. It was highly anticipated and was the most anticipated Journey to the West-themed game 10 years ago. However, the main creative team members Feng Ji, Yang Qi and others left the game at the beginning of its release, partly because they did not agree with the management's philosophy.

"God of War" had a bad ending after the White Bone Demon chapter. Game Science valued the explosion of the mobile game market that year and launched two mobile games in succession.

Four years later, Game Science started to develop a stand-alone game based on the Journey to the West theme, which is now "Black Myth: Wukong".

The creative team later said that they could not let everyone down again.

At the end of the first promotional video, they wrote: After the bones, we will travel west again.

How can we forget Journey to the West?

01 Carnival after 4 years of waiting

Even if you have never played a single-player game, you must have been bombarded with all kinds of information about Black Myth: Wukong on social media in the past week. This domestically produced single-player game, which was first announced four years ago and developed for more than six years, was finally released worldwide at 10:00 Beijing time on August 20.

It seems that there is no need to use more words to describe the significance of Black Myth: Wukong to the domestic game industry. After the developer Game Science released the 13-minute first trailer four years ago, the game media, industry KOLs and practitioners have made countless praises about Black Myth: Wukong.

Even August 20th of each year - which is the fixed promotional node for Game Science every year - is called the Spring Festival Gala of the gaming industry by domestic players, corresponding to the name of Apple’s September new product launch conference as the “Technology Spring Festival Gala”.

To date, the first trailer of "Black Myth: Wukong" has received more than 57 million views on Bilibili - this may be the most viewed game trailer on the Chinese video website, 20 million more than the 5G video that made Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications student He Tongxue famous.

Black Myth: Wukong video views

The climax was the past 48 hours. Prior to this, the media ratings of Black Myth: Wukong were released. According to statistics from the game rating website Metacritic, 57 media outlets gave an average score of 82 points. Three media outlets gave full marks, and nine media outlets gave scores above 90 points. Even so, the deductions from more media outlets were not due to the quality of the game itself, but to external factors such as differences in cultural understanding and early optimization.

Chinese local brands have taken this opportunity to launch a grand joint marketing campaign. According to a rough estimate by Shanshang, Black Myth: Wukong has officially announced six partner brands, including Lenovo, Didi, Luckin Coffee, and Hisense.

Yesterday morning, Luckin Coffee, which was the fastest to take action, was overwhelmed by the rush of players placing orders, causing the system to fail and unable to place orders. Luckin CGO Yang Fei said that the surrounding areas across the country were sold out in seconds and the system almost crashed. "The purchasing power of men has overturned the team's cognition this morning."

After Black Myth: Wukong began pre-downloading on the game platform Steam, the download bandwidth usage of Steam soared, reaching a maximum of 70Tbps, breaking the previous record of Cyberpunk 2077. The highest download volume was in Asia, reaching 59.3 Tbps, exceeding the total of other regions.

Now, "Black Myth: Wukong" is the global sales champion on the Steam platform, and even the deluxe edition upgrade package sold together with the main game has squeezed into the top ten sales charts in some regions.

Steam Global Sales Ranking

The simple support of Chinese gamers may be understandable. Over the past 20 years, China's game industry has grown from nothing to something. We have the world's highest-valued game company, the world's largest single game market, the world's highest-grossing game products, and the world's largest number of game practitioners. However, until the birth of Black Myth: Wukong, we did not have a product that could rival overseas 3A game masterpieces.

Video games have long been called the ninth art. Chinese gamers have experienced the joy of the cowboys in the American West in the 18th century, the magnificence of Nordic mythology, the alliances of the Japanese Warring States period, and the desperate life in American cities in the 21st century, but have never seen an immersive game world from China.

"Black Myth: Wukong" can be regarded as the only isolated case at present. The amount of attention it has received has long surpassed the game itself, and people have begun to regard it as a weather vane for the future of domestic games. In the last few hours before the release, the entry of "Black Myth: Wukong" firmly occupied the top spot on Weibo's hot search list. Even though August 20 was a working day, countless people still took time off to wait for the game. They shouted the lines in the game, "The people of destiny have gathered." 02｜Give it a try, you won't die

As the game developer, the creative team of Game Science was in great shock from the morning when the first trailer was released four years ago. They initially thought that the trailer would only have a few hundred thousand views, but the final attention made them at a loss.

At that time, the game had been in development for 2 years, and just a few levels had been completed. It was not yet mature and was just an early version. Game Science later explained that the direct reason for releasing the early video was that "the development team was very short of people, especially experts." The real difficulty they faced at that time was that they could not recruit people, and they hoped to use the promotional video to attract more talents to join.

This is not a story that went smoothly from the beginning. It is hard to imagine that when the first trailer was released, Game Science was a small and medium-sized game company that had only been established for 4 years and had a team of no more than 100 people. They had never had experience in developing large-scale stand-alone games before, and had only developed two mobile game products.

The developer of the God of War series, Sony Santa Monica Studio, has been established for 25 years and has a team of more than 250 people. It took them 8 years to develop the God of War 3 and the epoch-making God of War 4.

Sony Santa Monica Studio

Feng Ji, founder of Game Science, said in an interview with Chule.com in 2020 that the difficulty of making the game's earliest Black Wind Mountain level was beyond the imagination of most of them. They had no precedent to follow, and had to figure out everything from scratch. Even the most basic character movements had to be learned from public speeches by major game companies.

"We worked backwards to find out the details of Ubisoft's various plans. For some places, Ubisoft did not disclose the specific implementation methods, but we also found ways to make them happen. For example, what specifications should be used to design the entire set of actions, and how to support some strange walking animations..." said Feng Ji.

In their reviews of Black Myth: Wukong, the media almost always mentioned their surprise at Game Science. IGN China gave it a perfect score, and they used hundreds of words at the beginning of the review to emphasize that Game Science had no experience in console development before, and the team only had more than 30 people at the beginning of the project.

IGN China's editors warned themselves to have reasonable expectations for this game and not to compare it with top works born from mature industries such as "God of War" and "Elden Ring", but in the end, "Black Myth" Wukong exceeded their expectations in every dimension.

Feng Ji later recalled that when they finally decided to start the project of "Black Myth: Wukong", they knew before that they had to make a stand-alone game, but they always felt that the time was not right. They needed a lot of money and many prerequisites. "Anyway, they just wanted to wait for the right time."

But then they finally decided to start. Feng Ji told the media that they were only sure of the future of the stand-alone market, and they firmly believed that the Chinese stand-alone game market could surpass Japan and become a gaming powerhouse comparable to the United States. "You can never be ready."

Screenshot of Feng Ji's media interview

On the day when Black Myth: Wukong officially opened for pre-sale, Feng Ji said that most of the decisions he made during the development process could be simplified into two words: try.

"Try the features that others have implemented flawlessly ten years ago, but we still can't get right. Try the creative ideas that everyone is excited about talking about all day long, but the actual quality is terrible. Try the gameplay that was boasted about in the promotional video with a demo, but the performance is poor or it is quite boring when it is actually implemented. Try everything that looks beautiful, but because of overconfidence or momentary inspiration, you invest a lot of time in trial and error, but repeatedly hit a wall and get hurt." He said, just try it, it won't kill you.

Screenshot of Feng Ji's Weibo

03 The little monkey will grow up, and so will you

In the two months since the official pre-sale of Black Myth: Wukong, countless media outlets have tried to calculate the huge returns that this game could bring to Game Science. Some media outlets cited sales data on the Steam platform and made a simple calculation, saying that based on the 1.2 million pre-sales on Steam at the time, multiplied by the standard version's price of 268 yuan, Game Science reaped a return of 400 million yuan in the pre-sale stage alone.

Some optimistic game practitioners believe that the final sales volume of "Black Myth: Wukong" may reach 5 million copies, and the cumulative revenue will exceed 1.3 billion yuan.

But even so, such results are difficult to compare with the current popular mobile games considering the long development cycle and huge investment of stand-alone games.

Single-player games with a buyout model, especially 3A-level games, have always been at the top of the gaming industry, but they have never been one of the most profitable games.

Elden Ring, released in 2022, is the most successful stand-alone game in the past two years, with cumulative global sales of 25 million copies, and the market estimates that its cumulative revenue is about 7.45 billion yuan. In comparison, Tencent's mobile game Honor of Kings has a turnover of about 39.1 billion yuan a year.

Even at a time when China's stand-alone game market is recovering, according to data released by the China Audio-Video and Digital Publishing Association's Game Working Committee, the actual sales revenue of the domestic game market in the first half of 2024 was 147.267 billion yuan, of which the actual sales revenue of the console game market was only 797 million yuan, and the mobile game market was 107.517 billion yuan. Even the revenue of mini-program mobile games is 20 times that of console games, with revenue of 16.603 billion yuan in the first half of the year.

In the more mature overseas game market, large developers are also having a hard time. The latest news about the well-known game company Ubisoft is layoffs, which is their second layoff this year. In two years, Ubisoft has laid off a total of 1,700 employees, and their goal is to achieve a cost reduction of 200 million euros by 2026.

Perhaps, you can understand why Black Myth: Wukong was not created by gaming giants such as Tencent and NetEase. It was not created by careful market judgment or careful calculation of input and output. It could only be created by a group of small and medium-sized gaming companies that love the gaming industry and are willing to spend 6 years on it.

To some extent, you can perhaps use the emergence of The Wandering Earth to understand Black Myth: Wukong. Before The Wandering Earth, director Guo Fan's only two film works were a youth film and a small- to medium-budget debut. The same unknown team and unknown creators, the same experience in operating such a large project, and the same industrialized process that needed to be explored from scratch.

The Wandering Earth, released in 2019

The only question is who will take that step first. The industry is happy to see such progress. After the release of the first trailer of Game Science, Tencent, which had previously left the main creative team of Game Science, sent an investment invitation - in the game market, Tencent has always been the one that is popular but not well-received. For this reason, they had to set the "three no principles" for this investment: not interfering in business decisions, not seizing the leading position of the project, and not seeking distribution and operation, and holding 5% of the shares. Prior to this, Game Science had only publicly accepted one round of investment, and the investor was Hero Entertainment.

You can still see the immaturity of Game Science from the current game release process. For example, their poor localization, frequent performance issues in foreign media reviews, or their first launch platform not including Microsoft's Xbox, and they did not include a physical disc at the time of the first release. Game Science explained that this was their first time to release a console game globally, and they lacked sufficient offline resources to sell physical discs at the same time as the game was officially released.

Five hours before the official release of Black Myth: Wukong, Feng Ji almost stayed awake all night, just like the night before the release of the first trailer four years ago.

He said at 5 a.m. today that in another 5 hours, "Black Myth: Wukong" will be unlocked globally, and he couldn't help but give a few more words of advice.

"Focus is close to happiness; seriousness is salvation. Life is much more difficult than games. Don't be scared by those bluffing monster kings. The little monkey will grow up, and so will you."

Author｜Xue Xingxing Editor｜Jiang Jiao