(Bloomberg) -- Black Myth: Wukong has sold 18 million copies in two weeks — one of the fastest starts the global gaming industry has seen. That record pace has in turn minted millions for its earliest and biggest investor.
Wukong was a leap of faith for Daniel Wu, whose little-known Hero Games is the biggest external shareholder in creator Game Science. His startup stuck with its partner through years of flops and contributed a large chunk of the blockbuster title’s $70 million budget over six years of development, an unheard-of undertaking for a Chinese project.
It paid off big time. The action game based on the legend of the Monkey King has outsold industry icons such as Elden Ring and Zelda, at least in its initial spurt. It can reach 30 million sales over its lifetime, augmented with an expansion to come, Wu told Bloomberg News.
China’s biggest PC creation emerged from a creative team whose biggest claim to fame before this summer was a visit from Apple Inc.’s Tim Cook. Wu, who escorted the iPhone boss around Hero’s Shanghai offices in 2017, said one of its early collaborations with Game Science caught Cook’s eye — though that project ultimately tanked. It took another four years before Tencent Holdings Ltd. invested in Hero’s investee, after a tantalizing Wukong trailer.
Today, Game Science is worth several billion yuan, Wu said, marking a return of several-fold on his studio’s 20% stake. Hero Games had paid just 60 million yuan ($8.5 million) for its slice in 2017. Both startups find themselves unexpectedly in the spotlight, hailed for finally showing China is capable of producing a big-budget title on par with the best of the West.
“If you want to hear the truth, Game Science’s success today is built upon its four failures in a row,” the 36-year-old Wu said in an exclusive interview from his Beijing office. “Wukong proves not only that we have top-notch game-making capabilities, but also we can tell a good story with Chinese elements.”
For Wu, who gave up a career as a startup financier to immerse himself in games close to a decade ago, Wukong is much more than just a groundbreaking game. He and Game Science co-founder Feng Ji, five years his elder, tied their fortunes to the success of a title built for consoles and PCs, in a country dominated by mobile entertainment.
Since its release on Aug. 20, the game has broken several records for single-player titles, eclipsing the likes of Cyberpunk 2077 with runaway popularity at home in China. It’s estimated to have earned $700 million so far, overshadowed only by Call of Duty’s historic $1 billion in 10 days, according to Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad. He sees overseas sales accounting for a larger share going forward as the game’s global renown grows.
Wukong got a lift from state media lauding its faithful depiction of historic and cultural sites, but success came only after Wu and Feng risked everything to realize the project.
“We were two drowning rats,” Wu, whose company is still not profitable, said of himself and Feng. “Neither of us was afraid of failure, and he already knew his next step. The only thing is that he needed me to place even bigger bets.”
Game Science had struck out with its three prior efforts, which were more modest free-to-play mobile games chasing attention in the world’s biggest games arena. One of them, Art of War: Red Tides, even got prime placement on the iOS App Store after Cook’s visit, but to no avail.
As the sole investor and publishing partner of Game Science, Hero Games took significant losses, but Wu didn’t shy away in 2018 when Feng, now his late-night League of Legends teammate, reached out for more money to craft an ambitious project then codenamed Black Myth One.
It won’t take another six years for the next chapter in what’s planned to be a series based on Chinese mythology — though that won’t be a sequel, Wu said. Game Science is working on an expansion to Wukong, which will give it a chance to monetize the game a second time. 2022’s Elden Ring, a title with similar play style and design, has shown how the release of an expansion — this year’s Shadow of the Erdtree — can spur a fresh flurry of sales for the original.
Wu co-founded Hero Games in 2015 after a three-year stint with famed Chinese venture firm ZhenFund. He zeroed in on Feng and his Game Science team early on, describing them as an asset he couldn’t afford to miss out on. At Tencent, Feng had led a team of 250 people on the development of online role-playing game Asura, inspired by similar folklore to Wukong. The title launched in 2010 and initially won praise for its design, though it later upset players with practices around its in-game shop that were deemed exploitative.
Hero Games, which orchestrated a marketing blitz around Wukong that included Luckin Coffee giveaways, also drew criticism outside of China for its guidance to streamers playing Wukong to not discuss “feminist propaganda,” politics or Covid-19. Wu declined to comment on the matter.
The 2,000-person Hero Games team, even with that huge winning bet in its portfolio, isn’t making a profit. Wu’s company is on a yearslong transition from publisher to developer, and it’s facing the same challenges that Game Science ran into when trying to score a mobile hit. Until it breaks through, Wu’s message to staff this year will be to learn to embrace the death of your project.
“This is the most gruesome year for China’s games industry ever,” Wu said, noting the large number of unsuccessful games that few will ever see or hear about. The country’s economic difficulties have cut into entertainment spending and forced many studios to reconsider or abandon projects.
That makes the triumph of Wukong all the sweeter. Wu expects it will fire up passions and interest to create more games based China’s rich history and culture — and more courage to build for consoles.
When Wu encountered the first big fight in Wukong on his PlayStation 5, he texted Feng to say he was welling up.
“How dare you cry without me?” Feng texted him back.
--With assistance from Pei Li.
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.