BEIJING – Gaming enthusiast Yang Jingyan was among hundreds of thousands of Chinese who played China’s first blockbuster video game, Black Myth: Wukong, on theHe had been looking forward to the action role-playing game featuring the hero Sun Wukong, or the Monkey King, ever since it was announced in 2020 by its developer, Shenzhen-headquartered studio Game Science.
The power of the world’s largest gaming market meant that within a day of its release, Wukong surged to become the most-played single-player game ever on Steam, a popular video game distribution platform. Nearly 90 per cent of its players are from China, where it generated significant buzz. Chinese analysts estimated that Wukong has sold more than 4.5 million copies at its launch and this has raised hopes that it can become China’s next big cultural export. For comparison, another AAA action role-playing game, Elden Ring, by Japanese developer FromSoftware, has sold more than 25 million copies since its February 2022 launch.
But Assistant Professor Cao Xuenan, who teaches cultural studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, said that to overseas gamers, the fidelity to Chinese culture does not matter as much as game quality and its mechanics.