The rise of prestige Chinese games

polygon.com:

The swashbuckling antics of Sun Wukong, Monkey King and preeminent hero of the Chinese literary classic Journey to the West, is being retold in the upcoming Black Myth: Wukong, a gritty Dark Souls-inspired action-RPG that was met with tremendous enthusiasm across the globe. Within one day of the release of its pre-alpha gameplay, back in August 2020, the video chalked up nearly 2 million views on YouTube — and 10 million views on Chinese video streaming site Bilibili.

Yet the release of this trailer wasn’t the result of any concerted marketing effort by Hangzhou-based indie studio Game Science, which is mostly made up of former Tencent employees. As explained by Game Science founder Feng Ji on Weibo, the 13-minute trailer was originally used to attract potential employees to the studio, with Ji admitting that there are several technical flaws in the gameplay footage. Of course, this didn’t prevent the video from generating significant buzz among the local gaming community. In fact, it’s this very commotion that propelled Black Myth: Wukong’s popularity globally, suggested Xuan Li, the founder of Chinese games publisher Thermite Games.

“When it was first released, it [Game Science] didn’t even contact IGN. They just released it on Weibo and Bilibili [...] and it broke the record,” Li says. “Everyone, every single one of us were talking about it and then IGN picked it up, ‘Oh, there’s a game, looks like a great next-gen AAA game, [an] AAA action game from China that nobody knows about.’ So they picked the trailer, put it on their website, and it blows up.”

So celebrated is Black Myth: Wukong, that it’s not uncommon for local online media to herald the rise of local prestige games, using terms like 3A 国产, meaning