Black Myth: Wukong, the first breakout AAA game from China hits $600M in 3 days
Seven game devs quit their jobs at a tech giant to chase a dream.
10 years later, their first AAA-grade game just made $600M in 3 days. 🤯
This is how a tiny Chinese studio rewrote gaming history...
Meet Game Science: founded in 2014 by 7 ex-Tencent employees. Their dream? To create a world-class, high-budget, high-profile blockbuster (referred to as AAA-grade) on the level of games like Red Dead Redemption, God of War.
But they faced skepticism. Gaming revenue is 75% dominated by mobile games, and raking in cash. Why invest in a high-budget, time-intensive console game that would take years to develop?
It was a big risk indeed.
First, they needed cash. They spent the next 4 years bootstrapping, making mobile games to generate revenue. Their first win was Art of War: Red Tides, a mobile game that was released in over 154 countries.
Everyone told them to continue developing mobile games. It's a proven cash cow!
But Game Science doubled down on their original vision. In 2018, they set their sights on a concept based on Chinese mythology: the Monkey King and his journey to the west.
With just 13 people on the team, they moved from the shining lights of Shenzhen to sleepier, serene Hangzhou to “stretch their money out”.
For 6 years, they hunkered down and built. They released a trailer in 2020 to attract more employees, and the quality of the game graphics — driven by art director Yang Qi’s moody, cinematic style influenced by his background in watercolor painting — even led some folks to question if it was real gameplay or CGI.
Launch day arrives. The rest is history 🤯
By day 3:
10 million copies sold
$600 million grossed
3 million concurrent Steam players in under 24 hours
For context: Smash hit The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom similarly sold about 10 million copies in 3 days. Some of the biggest hits like Elden Ring and Hogwarts Legacy sold about 12 million copies in 2 weeks.
Black Myth: Wukong is a cultural milestone. It proves China can compete in the AAA space dominated by Western and Japanese studios. And it's striking a chord with players worldwide.
This could be an accelerant for the Chinese gaming industry, with stocks of Chinese gaming studios hitting an all time high this week. The potential TAM is huge: almost half of the Chinese population are gamers: that’s 668 million gamers, about double the population of the entire US. Over 300 million Chinese gamers are women.
All eyes are on Game Science’s next move: It already is hinting at future chapters in a "Chinese Black Myth Universe" – think Marvel, with Chinese mythology. This could be the start of a whole new era in the industry.
Have a good weekend,
Tara
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