The hottest topic recently is the Chinese blockbuster "Black Myth: Wukong".
This game, praised by global media as China's first "3A game", not only received praise from the industry and critics before its official release, but also set the highest record for domestic stand-alone games after its official release, with "6.7 billion yuan sold on the first day of listing" and "3 million people playing online at the same time", and its momentum is catching up with the European and American blockbuster "Diablo 4" that global game fans were extremely looking forward to a few years ago.
From a non-game perspective, whether "Black Myth: Wukong" can effectively drive other industries in China seems to be a question worth discussing.
In the past decade, there have been more than a thousand games based on Journey to the West or ancient Chinese historical stories. Why is it that only Black Myth: Wukong has achieved such unprecedented success? In recent years, China has introduced a series of video game bans to prevent Chinese people from becoming addicted to video games. Why is Black Myth: Wukong got praised by multiple official media such as Xinhua News Agency, CCTV, and People's Daily?
First of all, as a game itself, the development team has received unanimous praise for the character background design and modeling details. From the leader to the soldier in the game, they all have quite independent styles and characteristics, and through advanced motion capture technology and movie-level lens operation, they show quite realistic combat movements and facial expressions. The exploration scenes outside of combat are full of details, allowing players to really have an immersive gaming experience in Journey to the West. In such a situation where the development cost is not taken into account and the game is carefully produced, it seems to be expected to be recognized by game fans around the world.
Secondly, Black Myth: Wukong has spared no effort in exporting the landscape and culture of China. When designing the game environment, field investigations were conducted in many places in China, and professional technology was used to scan the buildings, statues and surrounding environments of up to 40 locations, and these elements were copied one by one into the game or used as inspiration and basis for the design. In addition to making the game screen exude a strong Chinese style everywhere, it also shows the "beauty of Chinese history and culture" to players all over the world. Perhaps this is why Black Myth: Wukong, as a popular video game, should have been affected by the ban, but in the end, it was like the protagonist Sun Wukong, and its momentum could soar into the sky with a somersault cloud.
Then the key point to discuss is, when the craze of Black Myth: Wukong slowly subsides, what can it bring to China?
The first is, of course, that domestic games have once again become one of the most anticipated series for global players. In recent years, domestic games have tended to "imitate" and "re-skin", and often develop in the direction of guiding players to spend money. As an independent single-player game, Black Myth: Wukong can provide an immersive experience of Chinese history and culture plus electronic game entertainment for less than 300 yuan. I believe this is also one of the main reasons why Black Myth can sell well. The huge sales of Black Myth: Wukong also gave the game company sufficient resources to develop new Black Myth projects. It is also rumored that they are preparing to develop an expansion pack for Black Myth: Wukong and a Black Myth series based on the ancient Chinese classic Fengshen Bang, which is quite exciting. It can be seen that in the near future, the domestic game development industry will bring more opportunities to the entire electronic technology industry and is expected to become the next hot track.
The second is tourism. After the launch of Black Myth: Wukong, local tourism companies in Shanxi responded very quickly and launched many Black Myth attractions. This move can indeed boost local tourism during the game boom, but how to maintain it when the boom subsides becomes the primary issue.
The audience of electronic games is not equal to the audience of tourism, so the author believes that under the Black Myth: Wukong boom, more surrounding entertainment and cultural industries should use Black Myth to export Chinese culture to the world, such as using Black Myth: Wukong as the background script to shoot movies and TV series, and once again show the audience the beautiful landscapes and culture of my country in movies and TV, so as to reach a group of audiences who don’t know much about Black Myth and have only heard of this game in the news. Then, with the vigorous promotion of the local tourism industry, multi-party drainage can be achieved, so that this wave of Black Myth boom will not be wasted in vain.