To call Black Myth Wukong a success would be an understatement. It sold 10m copies in just three days, and remains the second most played game on Steam. It’s now sold over 30m copies in under a year since its release, equivalent to Elden Ring and just shy of Hogwarts Legacy. It received countless award nominations (and won a few too). Its physical release has saved businesses. And it’s still not out on Xbox.
In short, Game Science’s action-RPG has been a phenomenon that’s arisen amid a shift in the Chinese games industry and caused a global stir. As Nikkei Asia reported, China banned the production and sales of consoles until as recently as 2015. Since then, the dominance of mobile games has declined and the popularity of PC and console gaming has risen, fuelled further by investments from Chinese conglomerate Tencent and Sony with its PlayStation China Hero Project. Wukong is now considered the country’s first AAA release.
As Wu Li, CEO of Bejing-based publisher CE-Asia told me, the Chinese gaming industry has boomed alongside the country’s economy. “From 2003 to 2024, the total revenue of the Chinese gaming industry increased from about 10bn yuan to 390bn yuan, and total Chinese players reached 674 million,” he says. “It seems China has become one of the largest and most important single gaming markets in the world.” What’s more, the industry has attracted strong talent too, he says. “A sophisticated game industry chain is taking shape.”
Following in the wake of Black Myth: Wukong are a string of other Chinese-developed action-RPGs: Phantom Blade Zero, Tides of Annihilation, Lost Soul Aside, Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, and AI Limit to name a few, each with their own unique spin on a familiar genre. Of course, many of these games began development before Wukong was released. Indeed, Ultizero Games’ Lost Soul Aside began development over 15 years ago as a Final Fantasy 15 and Devil May Cry-inspired fan project. Now, it’s finally nearing release.
But after the phenomenon of Wukong, have expectations for Chinese-made games changed? And what is it about action-RPGs that’s proving so popular among the country’s developers?
The pressures of Wukong
To find out, I spoke with the developers of three of those aforementioned games, and each noted the increased pressure following the success of Black Myth: Wukong – but also the boost in confidence it’s provided.
“It’s not necessarily changed our [expectations], but maybe it’s changed others’ expectations and anticipation of us,” says Phantom Blade Zero director “Soulframe” Liang. “We did receive more resources, but we also received more pressure from the success of Black Myth: Wukong.”
With Phantom Blade Zero, its developer S-Game has managed to generate its own hype – with a little help from Sony – through its inclusion in 2023’s PlayStation State of Play. Before then it was “maybe slightly bigger than an indie game”, but after receiving “a lot of anticipation from around the world” and ranking number two in trailer viewership behind Insomniac’s Spider-Man 2, the studio scaled up its production.
Liang has been friends with Game Science CEO Feng Ji for 10 years and both studios share an investor in Tencent. “Everyone now realises there is the potential for a Chinese-made game that can make 30m copies in half a year,” says Liang. “Everyone had their expectations, but the maximum expected sales from the evaluation was 3m sales lifetime. After [Black Myth Wukong], everything changed.”
He continues: “We do have some pressure and we’re trying to protect the team to not be influenced by the environment and still focus on the gameplay. But we do have more resources, including funds and development resources.” That includes investment from the Chinese government, owing to the team’s decision to use 3D scans of ancient Chinese buildings. “We are trying to be focused and to make use of the extra resources to make the game better,” concludes Liang.
Ary Chen, Co-CEO & COO of Eclipse Glow Games – the studio behind Tides of Annihilation – says his team had the experience to succeed regardless of Black Myth Wukong’s performance, though seeing that game find an audience has boosted their confidence. “The core team members of the studio have a lot of past experience in developing other PC and console game titles, such as Yakuza 0, For Honor, and Assassin’s Creed,” he says. “We are heavily relying on that successful experience in developing Tides of Annihilation and those experiences lay a good foundation for us to further develop and polish this game.”
Still, he calls the success of Chinese games in the PC and console market “very inspiring” and something that “gives us confidence that we are on the right path”. He adds: “This project has been in development for almost three years, so back then we didn’t know about Black Myth: Wukong yet. We haven’t changed our objectives since the beginning, but I think their success definitely strengthens our confidence that we are doing the right thing. We think that’s a great opportunity for global players to see the creativity and storytelling ability from Chinese game makers. We really cherish this opportunity.”
“Everyone now realises there is the potential for a Chinese-made game that can make 30m copies in half a year.”
Li, CEO of CE-Asia – the publisher of AI Limit – calls Black Myth: Wukong a “milestone for China’s video game industry” that has “verified our expectation that the China-made premium game would have big market potential in China and worldwide”. AI Limit was selected in 2019 as part of PlayStation’s China Hero Project, before Wukong’s announcement. However, after Wukong’s success, both developer and publisher “felt higher expectations from gamers for China-made games, and higher pressure for development and publishing”.
So why action-RPGs?
The Chinese games industry is shifting, from developing predominantly for smartphones to creating PC and console games. That means bigger budgets, better graphics, and more complex gameplay.
Liang compares this shift to what he describes as the “golden age of PlayStation 1 and 2” from the 1990s, when “everyone was doing great stuff, even though the team was not so big and the budgets not as big as today”. He continues: “What’s most attractive is obviously the performance of console games compared to mobile games, the fancy graphics and controls, and also the way the game tells the story. All of these are the features that will be best presented in an action-RPG.”
Li calls action-RPGs a “big, classic game genre” that many developers played in their childhood, so there’s an element here of familiarity, as well as simply personal preference. Recent years have seen a further resurgence, aided by free-to-play action-RPGs from Chinese developers – namely, Genshin Impact – that have proven successful across both mobile and other platforms.
“Thanks to them, the audience for action-RPGs has become larger,” Li says. “Those factors contribute to the action-RPG genre having huge market potential. For developers, an action-RPG game is a manageable project. It has good engine support and a sophisticated formula to follow. The action-RPG genre has an easy entry point, and developers can manage the budget better. Those factors are very important to a start-up development team.”
Developers at Eclipse Glow Games are also fans of the genre, Chen says, and feel it is “something that we can do well”. Tides of Annihilation is more action-adventure, however, with “unique combat that’s intensive and fast paced, not like a regular Soulslike or other traditional games”. That’s led to the idea of summoning spectral knights in combat, as well as environmental puzzles.
Each of these games is aiming to take familiar elements of the action-RPG genre, but add their own spin. So far the results are a little mixed, though not all of these games are currently playable. Even Wukong was criticised by some for its repetitive combat, despite revelling in the spectacle of grandiose bosses. Phantom Blade Zero blends the combo-driven fighting of Devil May Cry with the interconnected maps of Dark Souls and the creepy atmosphere of Resident Evil, and so far I’ve loved its satisfying parry-led combat. Wuchang: Fallen Feathers from developer Leenzee, meanwhile, is beautiful, but from what I played at the Game Developer Conference back in March it feels particularly derivative of FromSoftware’s work.
AI Limit, meanwhile, is a spin on Soulslike gameplay but with a Sync Rate system that rewards players with higher attack power as they accumulate energy through battle. The developer “considered how players can learn to handle the challenges the developer poses and how many options are available to players for dealing with those challenges,” explains Li. “The fun of a game lies in the process where players get to know, learn, and master the tools that the developer provides them with, and then are able to overcome the challenges in their own way.” The game’s cel-shaded anime aesthetic also sets it apart from its contemporaries, Li believes.
Yet with so many games in the same genre, is there at least friendly competition between studios? Especially when many share the same investors?
“Of course!” says Liang, noting that this differs from mobile game development (which S-Game previously was involved in), where players focus on just a couple of live-service games for a long period of time, leading to “very fierce” competition. “It was not so friendly,” he says.
“When it comes to single-player games, I think the competition becomes much more friendly, because no matter how good your game is, the player can just play your game for, at most, one month let’s say,” he continues. “And then they will shift to another game. So if Black Myth: Wukong sells pretty well, this will open the market for everyone, because no one is going to play Black Myth: Wukong for their lifetime. They will finish the game and they feel good, and they feel confident about the market and the production of Chinese studios, and they are going to play another Chinese game.”
From east to west
Liang describes the unique style of Phantom Blade Zero as “kung-fu punk”, mixing traditional Chinese culture with “modern and fashion culture globally”, as well as merging steampunk and cyberpunk aesthetics with Chinese Wuxia fantasy. “You can basically see this as a general dark fantasy or Eastern version of John Wick,” he says.
“A very important thing for us is to reduce the cultural barriers,” Liang continues. “We try our best to reduce everything that may be an obstacle for players from other countries to understand the game.” That’s led to universal themes like revenge, loyalty, and love, he adds.
But do Chinese developers still need to be so cautious about appealing to a western audience? Black Myth: Wukong proved that global success for a Chinese-developed game is absolutely possible, even when that game has Chinese storytelling at its core. Its basis on the classical novel Journey to the West suggests there’s an appetite for Chinese stories outside of the country. But what does that mean for other games following in its wake? Should they pander to a global audience, or focus on something authentically Chinese?
Tides of Annihilation certainly appears to be doing the former at first glance, by using the legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Roundtable as its basis, and setting the game in modern day London. Just from the trailers and gameplay shown so far, the environments feature British road signs, bus stops, and iconic red post boxes.
“We try our best to reduce everything that may be an obstacle for players from other countries to understand the game.”
The King Arthur inspiration was a natural fit for the team’s desire to make an action-adventure game, explains Chen. “The team deeply respects British culture and London as a modern cosmopolitan city,” he says, adding that visits to London allowed them to gather feedback from local players as well as research historic landmarks. Still, the game’s elaborate character designs and elegant animations make for an intriguing blend of eastern and western iconography with global appeal.
Phantom Blade Zero seems more inherently Chinese thanks to its setting, and Liang notes the importance of keeping that authenticity at the core while making something accessible for all. “If you look at [Hidetaka] Miyazaki-san, for instance, or [Hideo] Kojima-san, although many of their games are themed in sci-fi or western dragons and magic stuff, you can pretty much see Japanese culture inside,” he says. “Although it’s nothing Japanese on the surface, in the core it’s still Japanese. I think that’s a good thing.”
He continues: “What we’re doing is trying to lower down the entrance for everyone to enter the game and they don’t need to do any homework on Chinese cultures to understand the stories. But since we’re Chinese and we have a special point of view on games and the industry, we are presenting some philosophies of our thinking, which is Chinese.”
Authenticity is important, Liang believes. Sifu, for instance, was made by French studio Sloclap but aimed to tell a kung-fu action story set in China. “We’re asking ourselves,” says Liang, “if a French studio can do something like that, why couldn’t we do something even more authentic in Chinese culture?”
Liang also discusses the importance of communication and transparency in producing a game with global appeal. He, and other members of the development team, have received education in the US or Europe, something he says has benefited them as they can communicate frankly in English to players and media alike and can understand cultural differences on both sides of the globe. “I don’t know if there are other Chinese studio heads that have similar backgrounds,” he says. Transparent communication was further learned through live-service games and the need to be in contact with a game’s community.
Li, meanwhile, takes a more balanced view. Players come from different cultures around the world with different experiences, he says, “but I assume gamers would have something in common: they love great game content and they love exciting game experiences. I believe there are no boundaries between gamers.”
What’s most important is the passion of a game’s development team. “Developers would like to make a choice based on their knowledge, passion, and honesty,” says Li. “Global audiences will support the passion and honesty that developers infuse into the game.”
