The challenges and opportunities Black Myth: Wukong created for China's developers
Black Myth: Wukong, developed by China-based studio Game Science, enjoyed a record-breaking performance when it released in August, reaching a peak of 2.4 million concurrent players as well as becoming the top-grossing game across multiple markets for the month.
Inspired by the renowned Chinese novel Journey to the West, Black Myth: Wukong is an anomaly in and of itself, since it's a single-player title only available on PC and the PlayStation 5, whereas many games that are developed and made available in China are of the free-to-play variety, including those with gacha mechanics. However, as reported by business research firm Niko Partners, China's games industry has continued to grow rapidly; it was cited that the country had 715.9 million gamers in 2023, and this number is expected to rise to 722.5 million in 2024 and 747.9 million by 2028. It's also worth noting that the Chinese video games market is expected to generate an annual revenue of $49.8 billion this year, with mobile games accounting for 68.7% of the revenue, followed by 28.4% for PC and 2.9% for consoles.
Given Black Myth: Wukong's success, we spoke with several industry experts and developers from China to learn their insights regarding this phenomenon, and whether this will lead to a shift in business strategies for studios and publishers, especially with regards to free-to-play versus premium/paid games.
Our respondents include Steven Wu, the former head of Tencent's NEXT Studio Shenzhen and Tencent Games global publishing. Steven now helms Emina Studio, which is currently working on ACE Strategy, a mecha-inspired trading card game.
We also chatted with Simon Zhu, founder of the China Independent Game Alliance (CIGA), the largest indie game organization in China. CIGA organizes several annual gaming conventions, such as the WePlay Expo, CIGA developer conference, and indiePlay Awards, and Game Jams.
Finally, we spoke with Spark Nexa's Jingwei 'Biaoge' Fang and members of the marketing team. Fang is the
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