#103 Black Myth: Wukong - How to make 1 billion dollars with Chinese folklore?
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Hello everyone, I am with LJ, editor of the World of Chinese magazine, which commissions Middle Earth. Hi Aladdin. So LJ, what are the exclusive stories that you guys have worked on this issue 104? We focus on how urban Chinese residents are reconnecting with nature. So they are lacking nature now? Absolutely. They discovered that there is a serious lack of nature education among urban kids right now. It has a negative impact on them, but there is also a strong effort to change the situation.

In a related story, we explored how a well-designed zoo in Nanjing has attracted large group of followers and how it has inspired them to care more about nature and wildlife.

And so in this issue, what are the others' articles? Yeah, we also took a cruise ship down the Yangtze River, traced the history of game consoles in China, and uncovered why Hunan Cuisine in particular is taking China by storm right now. So dear listeners, if you want to know more and support the podcast, go to theworldofchinese.com and order your latest copy. It seems that we can only rely on ourselves. The earth has made the last return to China.

Hi everyone and welcome to Middle Earth, your source for insight into China cultural industry. Listen to those who are making a living by creating and distributing art or content into the world's second biggest cultural market.

I'm your host, Aladin Fahre, founder of China Compass Production. If you need location scouting for your next project in China, film translation service, or find a co-producer, you should reach out. Also, if you are a Chinese speaker and you don't mind my broken Chinese, don't hesitate to check my Bilibili channel, Aladin Shuo Dianying. Link in the podcast description.

Unless you don't pay attention to video games or China, you surely have heard that at the end of August, China's first AAA video game came out on PS5 and Steam. And the name of the game is Black Myth: Wukong. For those who don't know, Steam is a Mac and PC program where you can buy various games. And a AAA game could be compared to a blockbuster movie. Their development budget must be around 200 million USD, not including marketing cost. So to throw us a number, after six years of development, that game had a budget of over 50 million USD.

and two weeks after its launch it had already made 850 million usd in gross revenue on steam alone

A lot of records got broken, such as how many people played the game simultaneously or the number of copies sold within a certain amount of time. Also interesting is that according to Video Game Insight, around 76% of gamers were from China. But it's not completely new because a similar story happened in 2022 when Shanghai-based company Mikoyo made the open world adventure RPG game Genshin Impact,

which had a development cost of over 100 million USD and that was also a massive success. And that game was more like considered as casual. So today to talk about this China latest international success and maybe one of the few ones that the country can be proud about, we have three guests. So we are recording remotely in four locations. First, let's go with Daniel in UK. Hello. Hi Adan, thank you so much for having me on. Hi everyone, I'm Daniel Ahmed, the Director of Research and Insights at Nika Partners.

We're a market research and consultancy firm that focuses on the video game markets in Asia and the Middle East. I joined the company back in 2016 and I primarily focus on covering the China, India and Middle East markets and I've been passionately following and playing Black Myth Wukong over the past couple of weeks now. And which level are you on Wukong? Currently chapter 3. I will admit it's definitely taken me some time to get there because I do end up

dying a lot, but it's very fun. It's a great experience. Next to you in the chat box, but on the other side of the Euro region continent, Lundi in Shanghai. Hello. Hello everyone, I'm Lundi and I'm a player from childhood and grew up to a game maker in a AAA game now, AAA game company now. And my work experience involved both

mobile games and console games in the Chinese industry for more than five years. I think I roughly know the whole pipeline of the

game production so yeah and this is why you're been invited onto the Middle Earth podcast we don't invite anyone just like that and just to be clear like Lundy doesn't work and didn't work on the production of Black Myth Wukong but because he's been working in one of those kind of similar studios and he knows the production pipeline that's why we're inviting him and what's your level? I'm almost I'm almost

have the same progression as Daniel. I just finished chapter 3 and have some progression on chapter 4. And I find... I start to find it's a little bit boring too. And can't get enough fun to push the progression. So I stop the game now. Okay, no need to listen to this podcast. The game is boring. Okay. And lastly, Jesse in Beijing.

Great to be here. I'm an independent researcher and I've also been a lifelong gamer. I also hosted a lot of gaming related events and through that I got scouted to do research on video game history on YouTube and Billy Billion have also presented lectures. So I had a very strong interest in retro gaming initially and video game history. I was very lucky to meet a lot of professors and people running archives here and through that I actually became more interested in the future of Chinese gaming and especially since Black

Myth made waves in 2020 when it was announced. I've been closely following that development and kind of turning around to anyone I could and preaching the fact that this is going to be an epochal moment, and lo and behold, it was pretty much as big as I had been saying it would be. Okay. And what's your level? I'm an avowed backseat game when it comes to these sort of hardcore action games. I have played a good 10 to 12 hours, but mainly I invite people over or watch my...

very gaming addicted roommate play and I've pretty much seen the most of the game through that. So I get the second hand stress but I've avoided the hardship. Well it's okay, I mean me I played only three or four hours, I killed a couple of boss and but I had a lot of things to do. I shot my first fiction

my first short fiction so a lot of things to do and prepare the podcast so we'll mainly talk about the backstory of the game like from the industry perspective the scandals that were involved into the making of it because i think we should not you know put things under the rug and then also one month after the game came out like where do we stand for and as usual we'll finish this panel conversation with the podcast usual quiz where one of our guests will win a prize

So I'm just wondering for someone who has not played the game, Lundi, I was wondering, can you describe quickly, like if you are going to explain to your grandmother what is Black Myth Wukong, like can you explain like what is that game and why is it so important that it comes out right now?

Actually, to my surprise, it's my mother mentioned that game to me first. Okay, okay, okay. Sorry, sorry. Then let me... Okay, let's restart the question because it's not the way... I was talking about your grandmother, not your mother. Oh, okay, okay. Sorry. Okay, let's imagine you meet a foreign friend.

who doesn't know so much about Black Myth Wukong. Can you quickly describe in one minute what's the game, what's the story, what's the gameplay, and why is it such an important game that came out right now? The Wukong is a Chinese mainnet AAA game. It's talking a story about a Chinese traditional story named Xi You Ji, Travel to the West. And it's an action game. I think you can explain why was it such a proud moment for gamers in China that...

the country was able to produce such a game? Because we have a lot of people in China are passionate to talking about the traditional story and the traditional culture to the worldwide. And the people both in game industry or out of industry dream to have a AAA game born in China in the

past decade years. As I am a kid, in my childhood, I'm playing a lot of AAA games overseas and I dreamed to have a AAA game to play in a traditional Chinese scene. So when the Wukong came out, the first trailer, we were so surprised.

and so amazing that we finally got that kind of game in our own countries. As a player like me, we are playing a lot of AAA games from overseas. It's not telling the story from our own

perspective. So we are all hoping to have our self story to tell through that kind of new media. For the listener, if you want to have a more an understanding of how the Chinese video game industry work, like I would advise you to listen to episode 67, which was about like creating video game for the West. And we explained like the whole industry, like what are like the strengths

and weakness of Chinese video game company which explained why people were so impressed that Black Myth Wukong was being able to be produced here in China. Okay so starting strong I don't know who wants to take kind of the tough question there was a lot of articles on the international press regarding the game for those who have not followed Wukong like could we start strong and basically explain quickly like what are kind of because it's such a watershed moment for the Chinese video game industry and then at the same time like they were like a

a bit of issue regarding the creators team and so on. So I was wondering if someone could quickly explain what kind of are the unfortunate things attached to it. I'm happy to give it a stab because I put a lot of attention in my piece recently to right-sizing this. First off, to tackle the first part of the question in terms of it being a watershed moment,

The thing is the AAA label. So you have Genshin Impact. A lot of Chinese games are seen as mobile first. They're either free to play games, which means that they have no upfront costs. And they're sort of continuous games where, in a sense, they've been sort of criticized. This model has been criticized for being a sort of revenue raising thing where it'll have a lot of predatory extra transactions or gambling type elements.

and so it doesn't have a lot of prestige. Whereas a AAA game, the easiest way to think about it is a blockbuster production. So it's kind of got the prestige of something like a Hollywood film or a major novel. So this game being a big sort of AAA game gets more notice and respect, I should say, in the traditional outlets. So that's why it's a watershed moment. In terms of the controversies, it goes back to...

We have to be careful in how we interpret different statements and things, but to give a very short interview, overview, sorry, I should say, it started with some of the comments made by the art director Yang Qi and the producer Feng Ji, something like a decade ago, a lot of them. So Yang Qi wrote on a blog post over a decade ago, I think it was in 2013, I have the quote here that he said, men and women's preferences for games are determined by their physiological conditions.

and that he does not need to make games for female players and some things are just for men. They are depressed, they are angry, and they are bitter. So that was seen as sort of a repudiation, like why make games particularly for women? And then when the trailer for Wukong was released, Fang Ji, the producer on the game, said,

said some remarks that were somewhat sexualized. And then when he was criticized for this at the time, it was doubled down upon by him. A lot of people say later on it became a Western thing because IGN had a big article in 2013 last year. But a lot of criticism actually came from within China and in Asian-focused news outlets back in 2020. I will keep going. I know this is long, but we can cut it down. Yeah, the faster you can explain things...

the better. Yeah, okay, sure. I'll cut to the chase. In late 2023, IGN put out a huge piece, and this stems where most of the controversy comes from, because it was seen as an attack because China has this big game, and then a huge piece was written about, you know, the company Game Science is hugely sexist. It went to the recruiting ads, the statements I mentioned before by the production staff a decade ago, and the workplace culture. That sort of led to some bad blood against IGN.

by the Chinese gaming community, but also a lot of Western gamers who saw this as something to do with this woke ideology in the West. And a lot of gamers have turned against that in the last, well, 10 years since Gamergate was a huge controversy and has sort of been a movement in the last 20 years. And this game has sort of become the poster child and reignited political debate. So unfortunately, you get this really good Chinese game and because it's Chinese and you kind of, when there's Chinese, you have to attach a controversy to it.

And because of the fact of this political culture war over gaming within the gaming communities, both in China and the West, this has kind of could be, and it's because it's so high profile, everybody is bringing their own sort of ideologies to this. A lot of the issue around the controversy thing is both in the coverage of how China is covered in Western media and

but also a bit of a language barrier between the gaming communities in China and the West. So there's been a lot of back and forth. So the controversies get thrown through this telephone sort of system where they're being translated back and forth, and I think it creates a lot of confusion. So reading over both languages and reading gaming sites and communities through both Chinese and English, I think you get... And even French, because there was a controversy in France about the game as well. So it comes down to representation, some sexist remarks from the game science people, but I do believe...

While these sort of perspectives are very real in terms of the issues, I think that the level of reporting on them is not in proportion to the actual scandal. There's not really much there once you scratch. There's some small minor things that you can definitely criticize, but I don't understand anything.

why this is the main angle some people are taking because it's very little to do with the game and a lot of the controversies are quite old. I don't know, I have my other feminist friends telling me that some of the gamer fans are like kind of having a huge following of the game and yet at the same time would start having some clash war on Weibo with feminists. Yeah, I find this interesting that it's when you look at the perspective from Western gamer would maybe be really critical of

regarding like China political system then suddenly when it's like a game which is not woke suddenly they're like oh this game is absolutely great I mean I feel it's like some people have their own kind of ladder of the type of people they like and don't like and then there's like a

like a preference of the type of people you don't like, which is really silly. But, uh, yeah, I also like have a friend of mine who worked in that team. He worked on the translation. He obviously did not want it to be part of the show. I guess he signed an NDA, but he was not apparently feeling super comfortable with telling later that he worked on that game. But, and, and to move on, like regarding the, the other scandal is that, uh, when the, um,

cut to the chase and go faster like when they send the key of the game to some various KOL, Wang Hong like to talk about the game abroad like they ask them just to talk about the game but just not to mention anything regarding political and feminism regarding China which seems like a really odd request I guess for those people who don't know much about China and I guess just wanted to enjoy the game. I guess it's like the Barbra Streisand effect like you ask people not to do something on the internet then obviously everyone's gonna turn to it.

Yeah. I don't, I don't know if the other guests have any feedback on that. If not, that's okay. We can just move on. Cause I had one question for Daniel, which is like, does those kind of, uh, let's say scandal, like, do they have any effect on game sales or people at the end? They just don't care. Yeah.

Yeah, I think it's a good question. And there's always going to be scandals that do have an effect on game sales. But in this case, I don't necessarily think the majority of buyers or even people that were following it were actually aware of any of this. They just had no idea what was going on. Like was mentioned earlier by Jesse, this was something in China that took place four years ago.

The comments are a decade old. The controversy happened four or five years ago. A lot of the hype and the sales behind the game were really driven in the past few weeks as opposed to a longer campaign for the game. Marketing campaign I should say.

So, to keep it short, I would say that ultimately not a lot of people knew about it. Jesse, so for the World of Chinese magazine, you have written an article which talked about all the reactions of Chinese video game players. So could you quickly explain what were your findings?

Sure. I talked to some industry professionals, some more casual gamers, and then some people that were pretty avowed hardcore gamers. I think I got a good range of people. From the industry side, I talked to Chong Tony, and he's the CEO of Independent Light. So they pretty much promote independent games in China. And I've been talking to him for a few years because he was incredibly excited about this.

He said, this is going to put China on the map in terms of games. And he noted, and I got a lot of good info for him, that this was selling out PlayStation 5s all over China. Like, people were buying game systems. Game stores were selling, like, three times their regular amount. And that even middle-aged people, I think...

Lundy mentioned his mother. Like, it's a topic of general conversation much outside of the gaming sphere. So I got that overall. In general, I think the reception is very positive. My other friend, when he finished it, just texted me, game of the year, hands down. I would note that all the Chinese gaming publications, I think Gamers Sky, IGN China, and one of the others, all gave it 10 out of 10.

Like I just felt they maybe felt obliged to give it a perfect score. It's by no means a perfect game. So I think there might be some blinkers there, but there's just so much pride. It's overall jubilation. There are those sort of controversies that haven't been forgotten. I have people bring them up, but even the people that I talked to that mentioned the gender issues did say that they're kind of separate from the game themselves and that it's more, they framed in terms of a missed opportunity.

that it would be good to have a game that was tackling or had better female or more female representation but that doesn't sort of... because it's only one game and the thing with representation is when you only have one example, one AAA game, it can't please everybody and it's sort of... is that an unfair standard? There's a lot of pressure riding on it from a lot of angles so it's... yeah but overall very positive reception. Any Chinese female gamer that you interviewed?

Yeah, yeah, several. We interviewed two. That's what I was saying. One of the ones I interviewed was very much on the bandwagon in terms of the gender issues. In fact, all the female people I talked to confirmed that within the Chinese gaming community, it is difficult to get their voice heard. But she actually, of all the people I interviewed, was the most hardcore gamer of these types of soul-like or Elden Ring type games. She had sunk more hours into these sort of games. And that was her that pretty much framed it as terms of a missed opportunity.

She found that these sort of gender issues are very important to her, and she did bring up the company's history. But on the whole, said, well, you know, the game is the game, and it itself doesn't really, aside from a lack of representation, it doesn't really do anything too overtly sexist. Maybe some character designs, not really out of the norm for gaming anywhere, but yeah. Now I'm turning to the industry professional. I mean, Daniel, you...

survey a lot of countries regarding Asia. I'm wondering, like, was this game success a surprise or not? I guess not so much because, yeah, like Lundi said, like, a few years ago, we saw the first trailer of basically the first real boss of the game and I feel like everyone was like, what? China can produce such a game? So people, like, the expectations were really high. Could you...

expand a little bit more about the success of the game and the numbers and are the numbers really high or not in terms of sales and so on? I think it's worth giving some background on the market and the industry first. When we look at China, it's a $50 billion market this year for gaming alone. So gamers in the country are spending $50 billion on software, services, in-app purchases, premium games, subscriptions. It's a very big market, but

When you actually dig into that... Since you give numbers, can we compare to, I don't know, Japan, the US, India? Just to give a sense. Because, yeah, 50 billion sounds like a lot of money. But how is it compared to other countries? So that 50 billion makes it the largest market in the world for video games. It's essentially on par with the US. You can give or take a couple of billion each way. And then if you look at Japan, that's less than half of that 50 billion. Less than 20 billion. And that's the number three market for video games.

So the US and China are well ahead, Japan third but in a very solid position. I think what's important though within that is 90% of that revenue, almost 90%, is from in-app purchases and free-to-play games. Premium as a whole has always been fairly niche. In fact...

mobile free-to-play is 70% of the market in China right so when we're talking about PC when we talk about premium it is very much a niche and I think what's changed over the past 10 years to make this possible and what game science saw and capitalized on is the fact that at one point consoles were banned in the country and in 2014 that was overturned you now have a growing console market secondly

There was a lot of piracy for premium games in China in the early 2000s. Now, thanks to Steam and online games, not as much. Digital distribution has certainly helped that out. You also have increased salaries and increased disposable income being spent on entertainment. Chinese gamers now are more willing to pay for high quality content and that includes games as well.

And we're now seeing that premium games are making up a growing, still small, but growing portion of the market. And so the fact that Black Mith Rukon can sell 18 million in two weeks with 75% of their sales coming from China is extremely impressive because we haven't really seen anything like this since PUBG in 2017. And that was a premium online multiplayer Battle Royale game. So it kind of fitted with the

you know, PvP kind of mode that Chinese gamers are already used to, whereas obviously Black Knight through Kong is a single-player game. So this just makes it even more impressive that it's a premium game, a single-player game, and, you know, 30 to 40 hours of content as opposed to

unlimited rounds. But then to ask like a tiny maybe not nice question but let's say if the game was using the same the game mechanic which I think are pretty good in that game but if there was no like Sun Wukong as the backstory and we just put some random generic bad guys like do you think that could have worked as well or the fact that there was like this kind of package

of cultured, which is great. Then at least I guess that would definitely push more people to go outside, learn more on the history, read the books, travel all the way to those amazing temples and places. If the game had known the whole cultural packaging, could it have worked as good as it did or not? I personally don't think so. Just to hear your opinion on that. I think this game did have that perfect package. This combination of high quality action RPG mechanics

The Journey to the West story in plotline. And then through this, I think one of the big things that really blew up the game was that initial trailer back in 2020 where it had 55 million views on Biddybilly and it really showed that they'd been able to find a balance between graphics, gameplay, story and other aspects as well. And so

it really has become a cultural phenomenon in trade overall leading to you know as you mentioned not just sales of the game but that that cultural spillover into other aspects of gaming hardware sales increased tourism increased brand awareness whether companies that they partnered with to promote the game yeah i think that something kind of happened when for example i mean as a french person when assassin's creed uh

Wait, was it in Assassin's Creed? Yeah, I think it was Assassin's Creed during the French Revolution. Like as a Parisian, I was like so happy to, you know, go along the streets and kind of rediscover my own city because I'm from Paris. So they really, of course, they kind of transformed the whole thing so that it can be walkable. And me, when I was walking from point A to point B, I'm like, no, this is not how fast you can go from point A to point B in the real city. But I was like, despite the historical ridiculous shortcut sometimes, like it was quite a,

So yeah, it was nice. It was nice to relieve like kind of my own hometown city back from that perspective. That is just me diverging. But one thing that Lundy, you told me during your pre-interview when we had a talk before the recording, I thought that was pretty interesting. I never thought about this.

Because, you know, as we all know, China has been the factory of the world for so many years. And now we slowly see the electric vehicle and the phones coming out of Chinese factory, which are as good quality as international product.

with maybe all the questions regarding the IPs of how they got this in the first place. But anyway, and then you told me that actually there were like so many AAA games being made in China, actually, but remotely. So can you explain a little bit more about that? The company started their business in China is mainly to...

build their own team to do the art resource firstly because the Chinese labor to do the artist resource is very cheap at the first and then they hire many graduates from the university to start to learn how to do the art production in for the game. The situation lasts decades and

And many outsourcing companies in China started to want to make their own game. And there comes to the MiHoYo, we know. And it is said MiHoYo make Genshin Impact at the peak. They had 2,000 people. And most of the 2,000 people is the outsourcing company staff. In Black Myth Wukong, we can see they make the content themselves.

We make huge assets in the game. We can see many different objects in many different scenes.

We've done this in only 4 to 5 years. Yeah, so just a quick anecdote. When I was in Nanjing to study at some point, and then one of my friends, he was working as a 3D artist, and he worked on the Sony game Horizon Zero Dawn. Really great OSTs for people who like to listen to video game OST while working. And he was telling me, basically, the game was produced by Sony, but they...

hired him to do those kind of external work of doing like Lundi was describing it to do like a 3D design and so he would spend like for example one week to make a tent like just a like a tent in the game or there was like a few days to do like a single rock and

And those studios were really secretive because he could go there, they would give him all the tools to work, but then he was not allowed to take his phone, he was not allowed to take pictures of his work, and he was not allowed to have even a USB so that he could kind of take at least a picture of his own work for his own portfolio. That was completely forbidden. I found this really interesting that maybe like those AAA games, they basically formed, they helped the local market in China to...

basically get to that level of the AAA game of delivering amazing gameplay and visual experience. But then also to keep comparing things, Lundi, can you, and maybe Daniel, after you can add on that, I'm wondering, can we compare, because we said AAA games are

I start my work from a mobile game and the team is grouped

maybe 20 to 30 people. And now I'm working in AAA games. Our team is distributed globally. And I think we almost thousands of people to work in the

one project and we already worked on this project for four years. I think in the Chinese industry, the mobile game is more like internet production. Production pipeline is low cost and fast iteration. And the AAA game, as you said, is more like a blockbuster film production. One thing I'll add is that we've seen

Over the past two decades actually, a lot of these outsourcing companies, the staff they have left to create either their own companies or have senior positions in existing game companies

And more recently, we've seen them lead this sort of industrialization of the games industry throughout China, throughout these game companies. And what that means is they're looking at companies like Ubisoft that maybe they worked with in the past, or they're looking at EA, Activision, etc. They're trying to create those same production processes that they use that are efficient and can increase output. And

They're also standardizing developer tools as well. So using Unreal Engine in the case of Black Mesa or Unity in the case of Genshin Impact.

And so, you know, Genshin Impact was actually one of those first games where we really saw this streamlined production process for a cross-platform title where they were able to create a large open world game. They were able to put out content on a regular basis. And it was all industrialized into this production process that you would see from a normal either mobile game developer in the West or AAA game developer in the West as well. And so, you know, we're really getting to the point now with Black Myth Recon where you

Chinese game developers are really starting to give Western, Japanese, overseas AAA game developers a run for their money. I would say, you know, maybe, you know, Lundy, you can comment on this a bit more, but there is still this lack of talent in the industry as a whole across AAA titles. And then on the investment side, single-player AAA games themselves are still viewed as inherently risky.

because they require a very large upfront investment, capital investment, in the technology, the art, the gameplay, the marketing, etc., compared to mobile games. And there's no recurring revenue model like there is for mobile games. So you have to depend on people willing to pay upfront for a game, which in China is already not necessarily as easy as in the West. And then there isn't necessarily that recurring revenue model

If you look at Game Science themselves, I think what's really impressive is they started out with this game in 2018 as a concept with 13 employees. And by the time they released that first trailer, which was a playable demo that they had, they had about 30 to 40 employees and since then have expanded to 140 with the game's release.

not including outsourcing. But, you know, it shows, one, obviously there's a massive scale up in terms of number of employees and obviously outsourcing is required, but also that while a lot of the game companies out there, like Lindsay just mentioned, have a thousand employees or teams of hundreds of people working on one game,

Gamesman is actually able to do something really impressive with a much smaller team and with much less experience. And when you look at the game you can definitely see where that lack of experience is.

but it's a very solid 8 out of 10 triple-A game. If they create a sequel, this is a 10 out of 10, right? There's no way they don't improve on it in some capacity. Yeah, and also that was on my upcoming question, which is, do you guys have any information regarding where does the game budget come from, actually? Like, where does those millions of yuan and dollars paying for that team for so many years, like...

What are your information regarding like where does that money come from? They say that Tencent invest them. And I think they have the government investment there too, like cut the tax or cut the rent for their company.

Because we did try, like our team at the Miloleth podcast, we tried to find anything more than just the 10 cents investing into it, like any local government help or international investor, for example. And we couldn't find anything regarding local government and international money. But yeah, I would be curious to know if there was any tax cut and things like that. Yeah, I can add some color to that. I mean, it's not necessarily different than what Nandi said, but first of all, Hero Games is...

invested 20% for about 10 million in 2017. So they actually took a very big bet on the company because the CEO, Daniel Wu, he actually played League of Legends a lot with the founder of Game Science. And through that non-toxic friendship,

as League of Legends normally is, but through that friendship they were able to talk about what their plans were for Black Myth Wukong before it was even on paper really. And that early investment really helped them. Secondly, obviously the Tencent investment in 2021, but then also in November 2022, the Hangzhou government has like a fund for gaming and esports companies.

And so there's like 173 different companies on that list. One of them is Game Science. And so they benefited from, it's like a hundred million RMB fund. And so they received some of that for essentially the development of the game and some tax benefits. So it was definitely a very risky investment. And if it didn't pay off, you know, they would have been bankrupt without a doubt. Because it's a $70 million investment.

budget just for the game development alone. So the fact that it has really succeeded at this level shows that they were right to put their money in early at this point. Okay, well you seem more informed than us, Daniel. This is great. And I would advise everyone, if you want to deep dive into the deep, really nerdy relationship between local government and foundation and culture, we have done an episode about that and

number 87 on the Minoleth podcast where we have a couple of producer and creators who talk about that really interesting topic. I feel it's always like we always talk about art but we never talk about who is the one footing the bill and I think this is a pretty important topic.

as well Jesse because I was also wondering because you've been doing giving talks regarding like Chinese video game and back in the days all the way back from the 80s like I don't know I was wondering if you see any correlation or any

I don't know, like I'm wondering like our, yeah, with all your background with the historical Chinese game from the 80s and 90s. And I'm wondering if you see some link with Wukong. Sometimes I'm also throwing like the most random question ever and maybe we won't use them later, but it's also, you know, the joy of, you know, doing a podcast together.

It's also sometimes to, you know, hit the bushes and see what comes out of it. Yeah, well, the interesting thing that we should probably note about Wukong is that Fangji, the producer, worked on the Tencent game, the MMORPG Asura, back in 2013, I think it was. And that was like an online game, but it was also based on Journey to the West. So that actually had a production of 200 people. So although this is a AAA game, Wukong, as noted by...

Daniel, that the production is much smaller, that the production on the original game that he did, also based on Journey to the West, was a lot bigger in terms of numbers, but less development time. Also, I will add one thing just to the discussion before about funding. It was mentioned in interviews that the staff, I think some people mortgaged their houses and also went without pay for several years. So the people were very personally invested.

in the project as well. But in terms of historical developments, there's been many games, back to the Famicom, back to the NES, the early days, there's been early games weren't licensed. So a lot of early Chinese games developed for consoles were

because again, China didn't really have a console market as such from the big players, an official one anyway, were sort of unlicensed games. You could call them like pirated games or whatever, but a lot of them just didn't have the licenses to be officially released on the console. But some of the very earliest ones were based on Journey to the West. So there is certainly a legacy of this theme carrying through. So yeah, in terms of that, I think there's just a bigger appetite for games set

in China, so I don't think it's just necessarily during the West. We've had a lot of Three Kingdoms games, they tend to be more strategy-based games, and a lot of them developed in Japan, Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Dynasty Warriors and all that sort of thing. But there seems to be a lot of games coming up that follow the model of these Soul-like games, and there's been a lot of great Japanese ones like Nioh and stuff like that.

But there's a few that... In fact, one of them was in development even prior to Black Myth, and that was Phantom Blade Zero. So the developer, S-Town, I think it was called, they had an indie game called Rainblood Town of Death. And...

Then they're reimagining that game as a AAA game. And they've got Phantom Blade Zero and Phantom Blade Executioners. And if you look at a lot of the trailers for this sort of games, they're very much in that mold, like an action-based Souls-like game. So there's Phantom Blade Zero, there's Lost Souls Aside, Project the Perceiver, Code to Jinyong, The Grass of Genesis, Where Winds Meet. There's like half a dozen of these games. And if you watch them, they're all like

sort of fantasy or historical China's tile type action RPGs none of them are out now probably with their as Fantastical as the what you're seeing wukong with the sort of beasts and stuff But if you watch them that you look at them and I'm not saying they all are generic or the same thing but there seems to be an explosion of games of this type and it reminds me of when there was an Interactive movie game that was the biggest hit in China last year which was I'm surrounded by women or something's a dating sim and

Now on Steam, you just go on Steam and there's 50 of this style of game. So I think we're going to be inundated with this style of action RPG set in China within the next year or two. Many of them probably quite good.

And back to the point about Sony and having presence in Shanghai, a lot of this is spearheaded by Sony's China Heroes project, which is Sony explicitly backing Chinese development and backing local Chinese developers. And they've been working on that for several years. And now we're really starting to see it bear fruit because there's a lag time of five or six years, these long development cycles. So all of this has already been known that this would be coming.

but there's just that lag time. So I've demoed a few of these games and they played quite well and I'm very interested to see what the global reception is considering so many are coming up. Okay, well, I guess everyone wants to have a piece of the pie.

of that 50 billion US dollar pie. So to finish on, it's been a few weeks. I mean, we're recording like in the middle of September. Wukong came out like a few weeks ago. So I'm wondering like how is the future of the game looking like Daniel? Like I guess it's always like that. Like I guess like there's a lot of hype and then after like the game keeps on slowly selling things and then they will maybe do DLCs and stuff like that.

Yeah, so there is a DLC expansion planned for the game. They haven't officially announced it, but it is in development. So we can expect that next year. And that will probably give it kind of a second wind of sales. So that is something to look out for. I think one interesting point that Jesse kind of touched on was that there is this kind of swell of developers who are now focusing more so...

Maybe not specifically on premium single-player experiences, but at the very least, AA or AAA budget titles that you normally see on PC and console, and not necessarily on mobile. When Fengji left Tencent and founded Game Science, one of the criticisms that he had was the games he was working on, like Asura Online, which ultimately failed, were...

you know, free-to-play titles with loot boxes, in-app purchases, they focus too much perhaps on monetization and not necessarily on the core gameplay experience. And that criticism is sort of borne out on mobile as well where games are really simple, one click, you know, one touch games, right, that you just need, you know, very basic inputs, very basic graphics, very basic gameplay.

And you can do fairly well if you have a hit game in that genre. But what we're seeing is that, and let's not say that's all mobile games. Definitely over the past few years, we've seen mobile games evolve into, you know, pseudo AAA products anyway. PC and console gaming as a whole is where a lot of developers want to...

try and succeed in, not just for the China market and build games that are based on Chinese cultural IP or stories, but also globally as well, where there is a very large PC and console market. And so that is why you have seen games like Party Animals, which is a gang-beast style, four guys style game.

really do well, brought up by a Chinese studio in Shanghai that isn't AAA in the traditional sense, but it is sort of mid-budget, you know, stylized high-end graphics and really fun multiplayer cooperative gameplay. You mentioned Love Is All Around as well, Jesse, the dating simulation game, and yes, you have a bunch of those titles cropping up as well, so

there's a lot of interest in developing these types of games whether they are mid-budget or high budget or you know true AAA and that's just something we're going to continue to see more of going forward. The games that Jesse mentioned absolutely are ones that I can put up there. And then the final thing is that even Tencent who traditionally speaking have always focused on free-to-play mobile games, free-to-play PC games,

Their LA studio is developing a game called The Last Sentinel, and that is a single-player premium game for the high-end PC console market. So even Tencent now have realized that there is money to be made here, potentially, for them.

and they're also investing in their own games that follow the same model as blackman through corn but out of curiosity because from the number that i see like yes it is you can make some good money on those games like more like a prime quality kind of stories but i would have thought that at the end of the day mobile game is a cash cow why would you risk uh investment and and

and time to make a game that could fail when you have, like, so much... You know, when you can make just so much money from people who spend money on their mobile. Is there, like, real business opportunities mixed with a little bit of, like, oh, we don't want to be just, like, doing mobile game. We want to be, like, the best. We want to do AAA game as well. Well, I mean, a billion dollars is still a billion dollars, right? And that's what Black Mith Wukong is going to end up earning. In fact, more than that in its lifetime. And so...

One thing that's worth noting is that even though China's games market is still growing, it's not growing as fast as it once was five, ten years ago. And so a lot of these developers are looking to the overseas market where Call of Duty sells tens of millions of copies every year, Grand Theft Auto sells 20, 30, 40, 50 million copies every year. It's a very lucrative market outside China to begin with.

And Blackmink Wukong has been that kind of proof of concept for within China. Because again 75% 15 million of the sales are in China alone. And that's not really something you would expect maybe five years ago, ten years ago. But today kind of makes sense. And so if you really can get a hit in that space it is very much worth it. Not to mention the whole

IP expansion, transmedia, ways of targeting gamers outside of the mobile free-to-play space. For example, Tencent with Honor of Kings is doing Honor of Kings World, which is a AAA-style action RPG game that is an expansion away from the core MOBA game, which is really successful on mobile and the main cash cow for them.

I would add that that was recently showcased very prominently on the Apple release for the iPhone 6 because Apple is trying to move into gaming. So it's very notable that Apple really put that game front and center. I think, Daniel, you kind of gave us like, you know, food for thoughts for the future. I'm wondering, Lundy and Jesse, if you have anything you want to add on what Daniel said.

I would say to check out some of the smaller games from smaller studios. We talked a lot about the economics of big games and there's actually in the last year or so, the layoffs in the game industry, and this happened in China over COVID, but it continues to this day and in the West, there's been unprecedented game layoffs because there is something about the boom bust of project to project work like blockbusters and movies where some of the development seems unsustainable in a way.

So there's always a lot of layoffs and especially a lot of these indie studios that may work for four or five years on a game and it gets buried under recommendation algorithms and that. And there's a lot of, if you dig, there's a lot of very fantastic work on the smaller end. So if you're curious about gaming in China, some of the most innovative and interesting stuff is happening in the indie scene.

Actually, we see the whole game industry is getting the winter now. I think the Wukong brings the sunlight from the spring to us. We do have many players in China who want to consume such kind of game.

I think the industry in China will get better in the near future.

But before we move on and say goodbye to each other, so we're going to have the last part of the show, my favorite one, the quiz, where we'll see who is the most knowledgeable or more gang guest regarding this topic. So the rules are simple. I will ask you guys a few questions. If you know the answer, you first buzz in with your name. Each correct answer will give you a point and the person with the most points wins the quiz. And

And the winner of the quiz will receive the latest issue of the World of Chinese magazine. So obviously, all the questions today are going to be about regarding Sun Wukong. So question one, let's go back to history a little bit. We actually have a historical monk that went to India and that apparently kind of went through the same stories of going back to India and getting some scrolls regarding Buddhism and spent some years over there and then came back.

Can you tell me in which dynasty this monk was born? Jesse? Yes, Jesse. Was it the Tang Dynasty? Yes, indeed. It is the Tang Dynasty. So I hope I would trust you did not Google that questions because his Zoom call is not open. No, I just thought it might have been one of those. There's something called the Tang Interregnum, which was a short period of between. I thought it was a trick question. Yeah.

No, no, it is. We try to do a simple question. I've been told by Sam, a previous editor of the World of Chinese magazine, that my questions are always super hard. I try to do them as simple as possible. Okay. All right. So one point for Jesse. It was actually pretty hard to find a lot of interesting questions regarding Song Wukong because they can become quite nerdy really fast questions.

Question number two. So now we're gonna do a "guess the number". Can you tell me how many movies, like fiction, animation or stories that are largely inspired by, that were made about the Monkey King? We're not counting books and TV series, but they do include all countries, like Japan and the US. So each of you are gonna say a number. So you first say your name and you say a number. So Jesse, you start.

85. 85 in Beijing. Okay, Lundi, you're next. 81. Okay, it's like the price is right. I mean, to be honest, I was going to go with 75. So I'll stick with 75. Well, Daniel, and you're actually winning this point because according to Wikipedia, I'm sorry, I didn't have time to go research on Baidu Baike for what it's worth. The official answer according to Wikipedia is 42.

What a great number. Yeah. So you think it'd be more? I'm sure there might be more, but I think there's also tons of TV series. So maybe that's why we have this feeling that it's been on so many screens. But like cinema, screen, film, animation and narrative, it's apparently only 42. I guess it's around those numbers. Third question. Can anyone tell me what is the famous...

manga that was an adaptation that retakes like some elements from the... Jesse, it's Dragon Ball. Oh, Dragon Ball Z. Well, it's any of the Dragon Ball series. Okay. Yes, indeed. It is. Yeah, because Goku is actually the translation of Wukong. I was like so shocked when I learned that the first time.

Okay, well then, congratulations, Jesse. You win the quiz of the Middle Earth podcast. Well, I guess as you're a writer at the World of Chinese, it was kind of obvious that, you know, you would be a little bit more prepared than the rest of...

people. Okay, so on that note, thank you so much for joining the podcast, everyone. Thank you for sharing all your insights. And congratulations, Jesse, for winning the quiz. We'll send you the latest copy of the World of Chinese magazine to your doorstep. So glad to have you until the end, dear listeners. I guess you like that show. And if you do, you can help the Middle-Earth podcast to grow to recommending us by your friends.

To keep extending on that topic, don't hesitate to check out the article of The World of Chinese that we mentioned, our podcast trilogy about China video game. And then we'll also have all the video game that we've mentioned. At some point, we'll have all the link of their trailers and their name in the podcast description so that you can go and buy more of those made in China AAA video game. Let me remind you that Middle Earth is part of TWOC, in case you have not...

Bye-bye.

Looks like our listeners are still doing their dishes. We're really committed to their workout. For sure. Since you're still here, if you want to learn more about Chinese society, culture, and language, you should head to theworldofchinese.com and follow us on WeChat, TikTok, and Instagram, where you'll discover an impressive collection of award-winning in-depth stories and fun, informative videos, as well as amazing podcasts. Of course. Well, until the next issue then.