When was the last time a Chinese video game made a global splash like the release of Black Legend: Wukong?
The hype around the game has been largely praise for the quality of the action, design and ease of play, amplified by Chinese state media, but that hype has been somewhat dampened by clumsy censorship and attempts to ignore allegations of sexism at the company that developed Wukong.
In a review, The Guardian described the game as having “smooth combat” and “stunning visuals, cinematic beauty and a refreshing sense of speed”. It also summed up Wukong as “the most controversial video game of the summer”.
The single-player game puts players in the role of the Monkey King, or Sun Wukong, a main character from Journey to the West, a 16th-century Chinese novel that has been retold in hundreds of films, TV shows, and anime. The game puts the Monkey King on a 15-hour journey to defeat a group of monsters that threaten the world.
After a huge success that included 10 million views of the game’s trailer on YouTube outside China and another 56 million views on Chinese video platform Bilibili, the game had more than 1.04 million concurrent players on Steam within an hour of its official release on Tuesday. By Wednesday, that number had risen to 2.2 million.
This kind of international success has not been missed by Chinese gamers or social media followers. More than 1.7 billion mentions of “Wukong” have been collected on the microblogging platform Weibo.
Chinese state media were quick to celebrate the game's successful debut as a triumph of Chinese culture and technological progress.[‘Wukong’] “This is an example of the growing maturity of China’s gaming sector and the integrated resource capabilities of Chinese producers,” the state-backed Global Times said.
“This release marks a bold foray by Chinese game developers into a market long dominated by Western A-list titles,” Xinhua News Agency wrote in an editorial published Wednesday. “With this breakthrough, the default language of A-list games is no longer English, but Chinese.”
Triple-A or AAA is an unofficial label describing big-budget games that are fully developed and released by major companies. The production cost of “Wukong” was reported to be around $50 million.
Wukong was created by Game Science, a Tencent-backed startup that has never produced a PC or console game before, and is marketed by Hero Games (which owns a 20% stake in it).
While most Chinese gaming is done on smartphones, and to a lesser extent on PCs, the initial release of “Wukong” is limited to Sony PlayStation 5 and PCs (via Steam, Epic Games, and Tencent’s WeGame platforms).
Furthermore, the game is being sold as a one-time purchase for CNY 268 ($37) for the standard version and CNY 328 ($46) for the premium version, rather than the typical Chinese “freemium” model, where a product is provided for free or at a small cost, but users then pay multiple small amounts within the game to gain benefits such as customization, game powers, or early access to new levels and upgrades.
But the criticism isn’t directed at the game’s source material, its design, or its entertainment value. Instead, critics are directing their fire at the science of gaming and the censorship of discussions that are common in China but less comfortable in the West.
Last year, American gaming and entertainment magazine IGN published a report revealing instances of sexual misconduct by several Game Science developers, misogynistic social media posts by founder and CEO Feng Ji and Yang Qi, the game’s art director, as well as the inclusion of sexual innuendo in the company’s recruitment materials in 2015. While the new product was open to review by Western media, the company’s refusal to comment on the CEO’s moral values sparked the first signs of controversy — though mostly outside of China. Game Science has yet to comment on the allegations.
This anticipation has been fueled by expectations that the game is on its way to becoming a hit. On Steam, discussion boards outside China were filled with largely irrelevant criticism of the Chinese government and its president. Some of the comments appeared to come from inside China, from users who could only access the game using an (illegal) virtual private network.
Prior to the game's launch, Hero Games invited outside reviewers and selected players to preview the game, but also asked them to sign up for a set of guidelines, which some saw as a request for them to self-censor.
The guidelines appear to lay bare many of the current red lines in Chinese society. “The list of banned topics in a document titled ‘Don’t Do It’ — politics, feminist propaganda, Covid-19, China’s video game industry policies and other content that incites negative discourse,” The New York Times reported.
The state of China’s gaming industry is telling. Fearing accelerating myopia, gaming addiction, over-worship of star players, and in-game gambling, regulators have been squeezing China’s domestic gaming industry and its leading companies over the past three years or so. To that end, they have withheld licenses, delayed commercialization permits, and added new regulations such as one that limits minors to playing games to just a few hours a week, and even less on school days.
It now appears that restrictions have eased and game approvals have increased this year, making the arrival of a AAA game developed in China another positive piece of news.
For some of China’s beleaguered tech and entertainment companies, the “Wukong effect” on their valuations may allow them to see beyond the game’s foreign controversies. Zhejiang Publishing, owner of Hero Games, saw its shares surge by the daily limit on Tuesday to a three-year high. CITIC Press, which is expected to publish a book of Wukong’s illustrations, surged 20%. Tencent, the industry leader that earlier this month also reported some recovery in China’s gaming sector, was steady but its share price was little changed.
The Global Times reports that Huayi Brothers Film Co., which has been struggling with debt and poor performance, may be the biggest winner on paper. Huayi recently disclosed that it holds a 5% stake in Hero Games, and its stock price has surged more than 70% since August 14.
Since the sexism and censorship controversies are unlikely to have much impact inside China, Game Science and other Chinese developers are expected to continue trying to develop other AAA games.
As investment bank Goldman Sachs wrote in a recent note, “We see signs that the government is recognizing the potential value of this industry for exports and culture, [not least of which was] “The official Xinhua News Agency interviewed the founder of Game Science before the game's launch.”
