Since "Black Myth: Wukong" "dominated" the hot search, it has been setting new records almost every day.

Recently, some institutions said that 15 million copies have been sold on the whole platform, and only based on the 268 standard version, it has won 4 billion yuan in revenue, and the next 100,000 heavenly soldiers and generals will fight 150 monkeys per person.

Before its release, the industry estimated that it was between 3 million and 5 million copies, and "Black Myth" lived up to expectations, facing resistance from extreme groups and plagiarism controversy, and still created a new history for the Chinese game industry with a fire trend.

For comparison, Diablo 3, released in 2012, sold 6.3 million copies in its first week; Elden Ring, released in 2022, has been an extremely successful game in recent years, with a cumulative sales of 25 million copies. It took nearly a year for Baldur's Gate 3, which will be released in 2023, to surpass 10 million sales.

Under the heavy responsibility of "the first domestic 3A game", "Black Myth: Wukong", which has set off a national craze, has undoubtedly succeeded in obtaining the true scriptures.

There are still many regrets on the way to learn from the scriptures, "Black Myth: Wukong" is not perfect, the road of domestic 3A is still difficult to walk, and change cannot be achieved overnight.

But as producer Feng Ji said: "Embarking on the road of learning scriptures is more important than arriving at Lingshan." ”

Value beyond making money

"Black Myth: Wukong" was born out of nowhere, a phenomenal hit, like a long drought and a rainstorm, causing a carnival in the real sense.

At present, there are at least 17 IP co-branders of "Black Myth: Wukong" on the market, in addition to the field of consumer electronics, there are graphics cards, controllers, TVs, laptops, as well as allies in the field of travel, clothing, and new tea drinks; The game console PS5 was directly robbed and out of stock, and some stores sold dozens of units a day; It even drove a lot of so-called concept stocks in the A-share market that couldn't be beaten.

What's behind the national craze? In a word, it is a sense of pride and intimacy.

Just like the comment circulating on major social platforms: "I have ridden a war horse in the Sinai Desert, been a pirate in the European seas, experienced wars in the United States, and been a silent assassin in Egypt." But I'm still willing to go back to my hometown and be a great sage. ”

The above-mentioned "Battlefield", "Assassin's Creed", "Call of Duty" and many other foreign 3A masterpieces, in the past, most domestic players were looking for cracked resources on the whole network, and sometimes they needed to be patched with Chinese, and they had to endure the occasional black screen flashback, and finally felt the customs and customs overseas, revealing a trace of strangeness everywhere.

Now that everyone can listen to "Cloud Palace Xunyin" and re-take the journey to the west, they finally feel in their hearts that China has its own triple-A game, and foreign players have finally begun to complain - how can I adjust the default language to English? There are also reports that some foreign netizens are tutoring the original work of "Journey to the West" in order to understand the plot.

An excellent triple-A masterpiece, the pursuit of the ultimate in plot and art, but also more complex in technical implementation. This not only represents the high level of the game industry, but also part of the country's demonstration of cultural soft power and technological strength.

"Black Myth: Wukong" has the power to tell Chinese stories well and spread Chinese culture beyond expectations.

"Journey to the West" is a well-known book in China, and Sun Wukong is a hero in the hearts of all Chinese people. But around the world, when it comes to "Wukong", the first thing that comes to mind is "Dragon Ball", a work inspired by "Journey to the West". The animated version of "Dragon Ball" has been broadcast in more than 60 countries and regions around the world, and the IP has been popular all over the world for 40 years, with a cumulative revenue of 7 billion yuan.

In contrast, our own export of Chinese culture such as "Journey to the West" is far from enough, and we have surrendered cultural treasures worth excavating.

"Black Myth: Wukong" has an attractive storyline, Chinese architecture with on-the-spot materials, and ideological connotations such as Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism.

In the context of China's game industry's focus on online games and kryptonite, the success of such a high-quality single-player game is like an inspirational myth in itself.

Word of mouth is not as good as the gold and silver cups?

"A lot of game planners aren't keen on playing their own games." Feng Ji once complained about the game industry environment in an article: "I'm just thinking about how to keep players addicted and spit out more RMB." ”

Over the past few years, China's game industry has grown into the world's largest game market, accounting for nearly 30% of the world's revenue share, and also has the world's highest-revenue game products. The essential reasons are:

It's hard to make money if it's hard work.

Triple-A games represent a long development cycle, high development costs, and a lot of resource investment, but it is difficult to say whether they can explode in the end.

The industry-recognized triple-A masterpiece "Grand Theft Auto 5" was launched in 2013, and the cost of "development + publicity" was about 270 million US dollars. Fortunately, the return has been satisfactory, with good sales in the past 10 years, with more than 200 million copies sold and sales exceeding $8.5 billion, and still growing.

But under the high expectations, there are countless examples of 3A games hitting the streets, even if they don't hit the streets, they are still comfortable with kryptonite mobile games.

Players can spend 268 yuan to play all the content of "Black Myth: Wukong", and the follow-up projects that cost money require game science to continue to invest in research and development to launch DLC (new expansion pack of the game); The same money in "Honor of Kings" can only be exchanged for one or two skins with special effects; And as high as 648 yuan in "Genshin Impact", whether you can draw your favorite character depends on the face of luck.

In 2023, the global revenue of "Honor of Kings" will reach 10.5 billion yuan, the global revenue of PUBG mobile game will be 8.1 billion yuan, and the global revenue of miHoYo's "Genshin Impact" will also be 6.726 billion yuan.

As an extremely successful game in recent years, Elden Ring, which was released in 2022, has sold a total of 25 million copies in two years and earned about 7.45 billion yuan.

According to the data released by the Game Working Committee of the China Audio and Digital Association, in the first half of 2024, the console game market will only occupy 0.54% of the domestic game market with a sales revenue of 797 million yuan, and the actual sales revenue of the mobile game market is 134 times that of the console market. The host market is a blue ocean waiting to be explored.

What is certain is that China's single-player game market will have broad prospects, and what is uncertain is who will be the first to embark on the journey against the market.

For game industry giants such as Tencent and NetEase, decision-making comes from a detailed assessment of input costs and market benefits, and the pursuit of word-of-mouth is justified after the pursuit of economic gains. From this point of view, game science is going the wrong way.

The birth of "Black Myth: Wukong" is like the connotation of the game - the spirit of rebellion against the old order, and a large-scale rehearsal has come to the real world.

Although Tencent did not end up on its own, its vision is indeed vicious. In March 2021, Tencent acquired a 5% stake in Game Science, and at the same time promised to "not interfere in operational decisions, not to preempt project dominance, and not to seek publishing operations", and Game Science's autonomy will not be affected in any way.

With money, freedom, and dreams, Game Science has gained an extremely comfortable development environment, and it can finally make up for the regrets of God of War. At that time, the preparation time and resources were expensive, and the quality of the game was praised at first, but after repeated updates, it finally bowed to the market, and the root cause was still "not making money".

Now that "Black Myth: Wukong" is popular among the people, there is endless traffic and continuous purchasing power, and the market will expect the "dreamers" of Game Science to bring higher-quality masterpieces.

What is missing to obtain the true scriptures?

In the end, the market environment determines the product, or is it an excellent product that affects the direction of the industry, which seems to be a "chicken lays eggs, eggs lay chickens" cycle problem.

The unprecedented popularity of "Black Myth: Wukong" seems to have put an end to this question, as long as the quality of the game is hard enough, there is no need to worry about no one paying, and the Chinese market has unlimited potential.

In the "hungry" state of the industry, a phenomenal game can play a role in stimulating market growth, and the long-term significance lies in the changes in the industrial ecology, which paves the way for the emergence of subsequent 3A games.

The first is the cultivation of user habits.

Domestic consumer groups have not had the habit of paying for content for a long time, from video websites to music apps, just look at the membership scale. In the past, the same was true of the domestic stand-alone game market, which also led to the popularity of cracked versions and modifiers, and many well-known game websites and forums have provided similar services.

Subsequently, domestic players crossed the era of paying for the stand-alone buyout system, and the field of domestic stand-alone games is still a "low krypton" era today. According to the "2023 China Tour Sales Annual List" compiled by "China Tour Sales Bar", 99.24% of the 525 buyout domestic games with more than 10 Steam player reviews are under 100 yuan.

In 2023, the number of users in China's game market will reach 668 million, and the number of Chinese players on the Steam platform will reach 32 million, so there is still a lot of room for growth. The emergence of "Black Myth: Wukong" is expected to raise the ceiling of the payment level and willingness to pay in the stand-alone market.

The second is the encouragement of manufacturers' confidence.

The revenue scale of the domestic console game market of 2.893 billion yuan in 2023 will not make the industry have much interest and confidence. 36Kr quoted industry insiders as saying that the industry needs games like "Black Myth: Wukong" to lead everyone to progress, "If they don't try, we will keep changing our skins and keep changing, just like the current two-dimensional game skin Genshin Impact." ”

However, "Black Myth: Wukong" broke the dilemma of "quality, no sales" in one fell swoop, and Goldman Sachs' forecast of 20 million copies and 5 billion yuan of revenue in the report is still a bit conservative at present. Single-handedly, it provided an opportunity to boost the sluggish industry sentiment and brought a major turning point for China's game industry.

Finally, the construction of a mature industrial system.

Where there is market demand, there will be talents entering. In the past, most domestic talents have joined the mobile game camp because of the high profits and high salaries.

Stand-alone games, on the other hand, have high requirements for narrative integrity, character fullness, level complexity and combat ceilings, and are more eager for comprehensive talents, but it is difficult to attract high-quality talents.

There is also "infrastructure" such as computer equipment, such as graphics cards. There is a saying in hardware circles: graphics cards were not born purely for games, but games have always been the main driving force for the development of graphics cards.

"Black Myth: Wukong" has certain requirements for computer configuration, according to Steam's official advice, it is at least RTX2060 to use an NVIDIA graphics card in order to reach the threshold of basic operation, which naturally excludes thin and light business laptops.

It is the lack of large-scale domestic games, the lack of the latest graphics technology in China, and the lack of motivation and environment for hardware manufacturers to create consumer-level game graphics cards.

"Black Myth: Wukong" is expected to bring some changes to this, and demand and supply have always been mutually fed.

epilogue

Enthusiasts are partying, and those who don't know much about it are wondering why a game can set off a national craze?

In the most bitter field, creating extremely profitable works is not a realistic version of facing the destiny of heaven. A game IP breaks through the boundaries of the industry and links with literature, film and television, animation, clothing, tourism and other fields, bringing a wide range of commercial vitality and imagination, which is more worthy of people's excitement.

"There are so many geniuses and abilities throughout the ages, and there are very few who have truly achieved immortal deeds." This sentence before the end of the game is exactly the path that domestic 3A has always been, and for game science, the best ending has been reached.

And many people of Destiny are still on the way to face the ending through hardships, and at this moment, the game and reality have a soul resonance that breaks through the dimension.

This article is from Xinzhi self-media and does not represent the views and positions of Business Xinzhi.If there is any suspicion of infringement, please contact the administrator of the Business News Platform.Contact: system@shangyexinzhi.com