Discussion keeps the world turning.
This is Roundtable. When a game drops in the middle of the week and pulls in over 2 million players simultaneously on just one platform, it's not a myth.
It's straight up legendary.
Check out Black Myth, Wu Kong.
Hey, Chen Ha, Wu Kong in Chinese, the video game that's setting the gaming world on fire was the magic behind its success.
Well, Black Myth, Wu Kong lead Chinese gaming on an epic journey to the west.
Hello everybody, I'm Ha Young coming to you live from Beijing.
This is Roundtable. For today's program, I'm joined by Steve Hatharly and you should in the studio.
First on a day's show, the launch of the much anticipated video game Black Myth, Wu Kong has already broken records.
This debut figures beat out the likes of Cyberpunk 2077 and Alden Rang, August 20th, 2024 is a milestone for Chinese gaming with this particular game and the country's first AAA single player game of finally hitting the shelves.
By the by, AAA in video game Lengo refers to a lot of money, a lot of resources and a lot of time in development.
Basically, the best video games out there and that's after six and a half years and 500 million yuan or 70 million US dollars in development.
It's smashing records on steam and international video game digital distribution service and storefront for online players in non multi player games and getting rave reviews and you can tell from my voice, I am super excited as a amateur non gamer but avid watcher.
Yes, and it's getting people like us excited so you know this is a cultural phenomenon and you should and you've actually played the game last night and this is for work.
You were busy working last night.
So tell us about this game that's getting so much attention.
Of course, so even as somebody's not that into game have already heard of it.
So basically for those people who are basically have no idea about games.
So black myth, Wukong is actually an action adventure game developed by this Chinese game developer game science and it's an action RPG roleplay game said in a world set against the backdrop of the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West, which is one of the four great classical novels of Chinese literature.
I wanted to know a little bit more about Journey to the West because I know that there are other stories that have come out that have been based on Journey to the West.
I think Dragon Ball is an example of that was loosely based on the story.
But for our audience members who don't know what role does Journey to the West play in Chinese culture.
Yes, of course. And I think that is one of the reasons why a lot of Chinese players are so excited about this because we have the kind of resonance with this story and why almost every Chinese person is so familiar with this story is because Journey to the West is a kind of recommended or even required reading or elementary school curriculum.
Also there have been countless TV shows and cartoons and other adaptations based on Journey to the West.
Absolutely. And this goes back to Wu Chengen, who is the author who wrote this classic piece of literature in 1592 in the 16th century Ming Dynasty.
And you could compare him to basically, I would say Shakespeare, but maybe others would think that J.R.R.
Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings, would be a better comparison.
And also Journey to the West is kind of similar or let's say it shares some of these common traits as the Lord of the Rings.
It's a group of people going through a ton of trouble and getting to a destination and fulfilling a final goal.
A Chinese classic that everybody in China knows about because it's something that you learn about and read about in school, which is why everybody in China is going crazy for this video game.
It's massively popular so far, but not just here in China, internationally as well.
People are loving this so far.
Yeah. And we can see that's because the image and all of these actions, moves of this game is just so astonishing.
So the game creates a kind of dreamlike world of this journey to the West through the realistic visuals and over 80 boss level monsters or in this game they're called it Yau Gui, which is Chinese pinging.
The Chinese phonetic alphabet.
And it's interesting that like you should mention that instead of translating into monsters, so everybody around the world would know, but they decided to use the Chinese original to refer to these monsters.
I see. It feels like in Harry Potter, the Hogwarts world basically turns out its own worldly language, its own curves.
Drift and the more. Slythera.
Yeah. Yeah. And I think they're kind of doing similar.
The same thing here is just keeping the Chinese, but there are some translations of different characters that come up and maybe we could get into that a little bit later.
But if you listen to the show, even in the last couple of shows, I might have casually maybe Throne Slander on the monkey king because I feel that he's a bit or it's being used so many times in Chinese pop culture, like you should mention earlier, like even with journey to the West in the last, well, trying to do the numbers, but it's difficult.
Okay, so there are so many different renditions and different takes on the character itself as well as this whole troop of characters and storyline.
And therefore, this is not something Chinese people find to be particularly eyebrow-raising, but this video on top of all of that still wowed the Chinese gamers as well as the world.
So this is something very special about this particular game and the visual aspect of it is outstanding.
I've listened to a few online gamer sort of podcasts, a very popular here in China and all of the, what do you call them, testers?
Yeah, the players, the people who are playing the game initially.
Yeah, yeah. And each and every one of them say, I don't want to admit this, but this has blown my professional gamers brain.
Yeah, am I? Yeah, when a new video game launches and we should say too, for those not familiar with the video game industry, games get released all the time.
Month by month, new games come out on new platforms and sometimes there's a little bit of buzz about a game, but occasionally a AAA game comes out.
And everybody is talking about it.
And that's what's going on in the world right now.
The buzz is not just here in China.
The buzz is internationally.
If you go onto various video streaming platforms, you can watch videos of people playing the game and then people are just watching him or her play the game.
And these videos are getting hundreds of thousands of views because everybody was just so, so curious.
And numbers after its launch were just astounding.
I think it came out at 10 a.m.
Beijing time. Yes. And what happened after that?
So we can totally see, of course, first of all, before that, the pre-self figures are astonishing, reaching many of the top of major global charts, you know, according to media reports on the 2024 half year sales chart for Chinese games, blacksmith, wukong, reached sales of 400 million yuan.
That's about $56 million at 1.2 million copies just one month after pre-orders begins.
And it is shattering the pre-self record for domestic games and also international games.
Yes. At one footnote, sorry, just to offer one comparison because it took 500 million Chinese yuan more than six years to develop.
But just with the pre-sales, it pretty much covered, regrouped at the investment.
Yeah, it's already broken even, they say.
Yeah. So just imagine the numbers that are going to follow.
That's really, really impressive.
1.2 million copies in pre-sales.
The trailer for this video game, by the way, came out in 2020.
That's when the debut trailer came out.
Yes. And not every big video game drops its trailer, just like a movie, right?
That movie never drops its trailer four years before the game comes out.
This was a long time ago.
And I was looking at IGN and other, that's an example of a gaming website where they do reviews about games.
And I was looking at other Western media outlets.
And they said, even when the trailer came out, everybody was talking about this.
Oh, yes. This is going to be huge.
And that trailer came out in 2020, those four years ago.
Because it was in some gaming conventions and a lot of campaigns about it.
And of course, it's because it is just so astonishing.
And we can see after the release of this game, which is the moment that I was playing, there are two million players playing the game at the same time.
One platform, as Klayon just said.
So this is just phenomenal when people are all talking about it and playing it.
And we can see it is even a global trend right now.
Yeah. And can it also just add one more point to why the trailer came out in 2020 and why it created such a big splash and the fact that even till today, when you check the figures, that trailer was among the top 10 most viewed videos on the platform of BiliBili, which is, can you say it's kind of like a younger version of YouTube in China?
And also lots of gamers are on that platform because actually it comes with history.
Because more than 10 years ago, if you are a gamer in China, you might remember one game that grabbed the attention of more than 600,000 people online with its debut.
And it is the team of game science that was behind that game.
And remember that also used the property of Journey to the West.
And it came out amazingly.
But due to some corporate issues, etc.
The game faded away in a couple of years time.
And the team had to leave and therefore started the company game science.
So in that 2020 video, that trailer, remember at the end of it in the black screen and in white Chinese characters, it says, we have some unfinished business.
Yes, very dramatic. Oh, yes.
And I'm not a gamer, but I feel it.
And for those committed fans and who feel that you have some unfinished business about this Chinese property that so many of us share in our culture and there's so much richness just waiting to be discovered by the Chinese players as well as all these players around the world.
It is exciting. It is exciting.
It was exciting for a lot of people.
Cyberpunk 2077. Do you remember the release of that game?
Yeah, also phenomenal.
Also released on Steam, right?
That was a record. I think it was a record breaker at the time, but Black Myth, Wukong, even overtook that.
And the numbers on Steam yesterday were just astonishing.
Steam, by the way, how do we describe that?
It's like a, it's like an online platform where people go to play games, right?
Yes. And you can actually purchase games on this platform.
You can talk to people who are also playing the game or you make friends with.
And then you can basically buy and play games on this platform.
And also, I read these comments sort of pointing to, well, there was one person a gamer saying that, you know, in the last three to four years, this is, well, since the last three to four years, this is the best thing that's happened to me.
So what do you think explains, you know, this popularity, instant popularity, although with quite a lot of build up as we've established in China and outside.
You know, of course, back then, four years ago, when the video was released, everybody was surprised by it.
And also, it brings a lot of critics on this video.
Maybe it is just a video, it is just CG.
And the real game will not be like this.
Or so actually, this is kind of everybody expecting the game.
So actually, the team has a huge pressure from actually the global views.
So, but after playing it, you know, my first impression was that, of course, the image was great.
And I think the game does also an excellent job of combining game elements with Chinese cultural background, you know, for example, the save points, which is maybe a common element that will have a lot of these RPG games.
Yeah, so that means like you'll go so far in the game and you save it.
And it'll, yeah, or it'll auto save it for you.
So if you die, you just go back to that point and start again.
And then in this game, it is represented by a local shrine dedicated to the earth god, which is also a very, you know, familiar or common factor.
Yes, cool, to the gonging journey to the west.
One of the, sorry, tinter ups, one of the criticisms, and it's not even a criticism that I was reading from Western players when they were playing this for the first time, is that because this is so rich in Chinese culture and Chinese history, a story written in the 16th century within the game itself, there wasn't a lot of description apparently.
I haven't played it myself, but about some of those characters describing their significance to the story.
But again, that's not really a criticism.
That's just them wanting to know more details about the story.
And this is a great point.
And I like to ask you for your opinion, Steve, that is when we're talking about, let's say, you know, something, maybe a culture, maybe a product coming from Japan, maybe a product coming from China or maybe India, you know, and then you're trying to get a foothold into the English speaking market.
And then when you have such cultural specific entities in terms of character design, in terms of, you know, all these things that pop up in a video game as we were talking about here, wouldn't it act as a possible deterrent as in keeping people away from it, or could it act as an interesting attraction to people?
And sometimes for the developers, they worry that if this thing is set up to culturally specific, as if there's almost a threshold for an average person to get into it, then it might not be a great thing.
But here it seems to work differently.
I'll give you a couple of examples, one from the video game industry and one from the film industry.
And I'll give my answer as a pseudo gamer and also just a western person.
I played a game that told the Japanese story.
It was called Ghost of Tsushima.
And that was based in Japan and it was about a Japanese warrior.
And I played the game not knowing anything about Japanese historical warrior culture or anything like that.
It was a beautiful game to play and it had a great storyline.
I didn't mind at all. Here's my film example, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ang Lee, right?
Now from the western perspective, we don't have those types of stories.
We don't have these kind of fantasy people flying through the air from the ground up onto a roof with swords.
We don't have that in western culture.
So for us to be able to view stories like that, it's so mysterious, it's so fantastical if that's a word that no, it's not a deterrent at all.
It's an attraction actually.
And also I wonder could this be a new type of globalization quietly in the making?
That is maybe when we were growing up as younger millennials, then during our teenage years, we watched The Lord of the Rings, the Hollywood movie written by an Oxford University professor.
And now years later, could we be seeing that?
All right. Now China's, well, there's this Chinese company.
It's produced a culturally specific and rich video game, but it's fun for everybody, regardless of your language background, cultural background to play.
And it's also part of globalization.
And if globalization is at its best, shouldn't it be to offer equal footing for different languages, different cultures to all show what's unique and appealing and worthwhile of individual cultures and have that presented to the world instead of one culture sort of showing the world, well, this is good.
Yeah. That is why I think you know, these details or this setting of this game is not only promoting the culture, but also resonating with the players familiar with the story.
And that is why a lot of foreign players are trying to say, okay, now I need to read journey to the West now.
Exactly. I need to know the story before it or behind it.
And yes, that is also the way of actually, you know, attracting people to be, we like to know the background of this story.
Absolutely. Yeah. When you introduce something from your culture to the rest of the world, albeit film or music or food or video games, it's just another form of art, right?
Well, like you just said, it just opens the door a little bit more and it makes people curious about, oh, I don't know this story.
Let me dig in a little bit more and see what I can learn here.
It does build a nice bridge, I think, between cultures.
And it's really interesting.
Sorry, just to offer one sort of reverse or the other side of the, an example that is also read so many Chinese gamers who have been avid fans of so many internationally well-known titles, often coming from the English-speaking world.
And then they were like, wow, playing this game, Black Myth, Wu Kong, I finally understand what it feels when a game is developed from your own culture and language and when the lips do synchronize with the original language as these characters were poised to speak in and also all these interesting designs that come from your own culture that without research,
you immediately get it.
And then you sort of can explore layer after layer in digging into some of these Easter rags that the game developers have so shrewdly hidden.
And I've read that some of the Chinese gamers are really impressed with how realistically they've created some cultural landmarks within the game as well.
I mean, this game, even if you're not a gamer, it is stunning visually to look at.
And that's one of the things people are loving too.
Yeah. This is actually one of the first games so called to spend several years in development with most of its budget allocated to this AAA production with development cost reaching 15 to 20 million yuan.
That's about two million US dollars for per hour of its gameplay.
And I think that is also one of the reasons why people are all surprised by all of these visual effects of this game.
And of course, I think we also need to bring up the dedication of the development team.
So after they achieved their first viral video like four years ago, they caught it a lucky accident and became even more focused on foundational development, the engine and field research to Shenzhi Province.
A lot of scenes are actually from these Shenzhi Province in north and China.
And they also realize that incorporating traditional Chinese elements isn't a shortcut to success because it's been very famous and popular in China right now with the theme of Chinese traditional culture.
But what matters most is being able to resonate with players.
Right. Yes. You should, you're probably referring to that interview that the producer and also founder of the company game science called Fengji.
And I disagree with the man.
This ain't no good luck out of a good fortune.
Did this happen? Because in this day and age, just imagine for anybody to be invested in one project for six and a half years and really just to keep your head down and do all the necessary work involved.
It not only requires patience, investment, but these, but this company and all the good people working for it, they've worked their socks off to get the funding.
Actually this company has turned out, or this team has turned out four previous games, including smart phone games to gradually culminate to this point.
So none of these success stories happen overnight.
It is the hard work, the very judicious decisions and strategies in business and really knowing your, your players, your audience and be fully devoted to come up with the best product ever for this group of people that you as a developer fully enjoy as well can something like this happen.
In my opinion, in my humble opinion, they impressed a lot of people yesterday.
I checked the numbers on steam in the middle of the afternoon.
It was 1.3 million concurrent players, meaning players playing at the same time that it went to 1.4 million, then it went to 2 million.
Then I checked before the show and it was 2.2 million.
The numbers just kept on growing so they did an incredible job with this game.
And the rating on IGN was 8 out of 10, which may not seem fantastic, but they're hyper critical.
So that's a pretty good score.
Yes. I think the first day after the debut as Black Myth WooKone, Hsienhua WooKone in Chinese takes the spotlight, it seems like we might be seeing a new high for Chinese gaming greatness.
Though this could just be the beginning, play this epic game and discover how your journey to the West start.
It might be just starting from here.
Who knows what incredible adventures await in the chapters yet to come.
