4 Hot Takes on Black Myth: Wukong
push to talk #34 // monkey game good
You have probably heard it reported that monkey game big. Monkey game break records! Monkey game make CCU chart Y axis go way up.
Every day, new revelations about Black Myth: Wukong are posted. And all are true.
Despite a $60 price point (¥ 268 or ~$37.50 in China), Wukong is speeding toward between 10 and 15 million copies sold globally in its first week—an astonishing achievement by developer Game Science, a Chinese studio heretofore known only for some mobile games released in the mid 2010s.
Wukong is also really good. And that’s reflected in the player reception: as of this writing 97% of its 390,721 reviews on Steam are positive.
Much has been made of the fact that an overwhelming percentage of these reviews (perhaps as many as 19 out of 20) are from Chinese players. But who cares? 93% of English-speaking reviewers give the game a thumbs up as well.
I decided to get in on the action myself, so I went down to my local game lot, asked if they had any new BMWs, and bought the thing cash-down.
There’s so much to say about this game. A few initial takes:
Hot Take 1: This is a Global Event for the Games Industry
There’s been some debate among Western commentators about whether this is a game that’s really only popping off in China.
But that’s the wrong way to think about the initial retail data we’ve seen so far.
The absurd scale of BMW’s success in China obscures the fact that it’s a hit game around the world. It’s doing all the things you might expect a massively successful action game in Western countries to do. It’s dominating Twitch charts. Big YouTubers are raving about it and getting millions of views while doing so. It has likely already sold over 500,000 copies in the United States alone.
Black Myth: Wukong is a global hit, no matter how you split it.
But even more importantly: BMW’s blowout success in the Chinese games market also has significance for the global games industry.
Because it matters for the West that there’s a TON of Chinese players who want AAA single-player games.
In some sense, this was already obvious in the available data, if you knew where to look.
Nearly a quarter of Steam reviews for Elden Ring were from players writing in Simplified Chinese. Even more for Cyberpunk 2077—26.4%—came from Chinese-speaking players.
It’s an open secret that unlicensed Western games are selling by the millions in China, often through Steam. And that applies to Korean and Japanese games as well—over half of all reviews for PUBG are Chinese, despite the Western media’s credulous reporting that the game was “pulled” from sale there in 2019.
None of that ever mattered. Chinese players continued finding ways to get their hands on PUBG and a thousand other unapproved games. And they’ve been propping up Western game devs on Steam ever since. PUBG’s monster success in China was the catalyst for a change in the size of the global PC gaming market for anybody releasing games on Steam.
What’s happening now is of similar scale. The influx of new Chinese players to Steam is of a size not seen since the 2018 glory days of PUBG. And this time these Chinese gamers are plunking down more cash for a single-player game with relatively high specs requirements. Some percentage of them are without question upgrading rigs so they can experience the game on its most lavish, demanding graphics settings. And after finishing up with Wukong these players aren’t going to sit around doing nothing while they wait for the next Game Science game.
The global PC gaming market just changed in ways we won’t fully understand for years.
Hot Take 2: The Game Actually Deserves the Hype
Nobody reads full game reviews anymore, so some quick observations:
Genre-Blending: BMW combines a bunch of ideas from Dark Souls (dodge-heavy combat, terrifying and difficult bosses with chonky health bars) with combat closer to God of War in terms of the fluidity and how powerful you feel.
Design: There are some surprising game design choices that make BMW feel special—the cheat code level spells and transformations, for example, are just hilarious. You can transform to get a second health bar like a Final Fantasy boss, and that’s something you unlock like two hours in.
Art Direction: The environments and character designs in this game are so gorgeous and strange. I keep saying “oh wow” when encountering new things in this game—it’s that impressive.
Creative Excellence: The animations between chapters are breathtaking. So much artistic talent and love went into these.
The biggest thing holding BMW back with reviewers has been performance.
Which leads us to the next take:
Hot Take 3: PC Gaming Benchmarking Is Pure Chaos
Here’s a paradox for you:
Every person I’ve talked to who has played BMW on PC has reported some performance issues. Lots of crash reports. Many mentions of weird frame drops, even on machines with NASA-level graphics cards. And at least one friend’s game kept freezing during cutscenes while the game kept running in the background and his character got his ass beat by a wolf-man.
And yet, this thing runs great on my Steam Deck.
It doesn’t make sense.
But isn’t this just the standard for big budget PC games? Every game launch comes with its own special grab bag of inexplicable crashes, memory leaks, and compatibility issues.
Almost everybody is struggling to reliably optimize their games for the wide variety of devices out there, and it strikes my American brain as the kind of problem money ought to be able to solve. I should be able to take my PC game to some shop that for, I dunno, $30,000 will pick it apart for a week and come back with a detailed list of everything I need to do to minimize performance issues on launch.
How is this not a thing already? I know somebody is gonna reply with “yes but optimization is really hard” and okay, so maybe it costs more than thirty grand. For many big budget games this is a $10 million problem. So why are we still solving it on a game-by-game level? Especially for everyone building in an engine like Unreal, there’s got to be some way this could be mitigated, whether by better shared tools or somebody with the chutzpah to start an optimization-as-a-service company
Hot Take 4: The 2024 Game Awards Could Get Messy
I’m gonna make some very specific predictions on this one:
Black Myth: Wukong will be one of the six nominees for Game of the Year at the 2024 Game Awards.
It’ll most likely go up against Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Astro Bot, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, and Dragon’s Dogma 2. The last slot’s probably a toss-up between Mario & Luigi: Brothership and Tekken 8.1
A very large Chinese audience will watch with hopes for a BMW win.
BMW will not win.
Chinese fans will be very mad and there will be accusations of anti-China bias against the Game Awards jury.
Quote me when it happens.
That’s it for this week. I’m gonna go kill a 1,200 foot tall elephant deity with a stick.
I’ll see you next Friday.
There’s a chance a random indie like Animal Well or Balatro sneaks in and replaces one of the Dragon games. Helldivers 2 will get snubbed for a GOTY nom but probably gets a nod in some other category. Hades II will probably be excluded because it’s in Early Access. Palworld will also be excluded, nominally because it’s in Early Access but also because some people are weirdly butthurt about its success.
Lol @ your TGA prediction. Spot on!
I LOL'd when I learned that Black Myth Wukong can be abbreviated to BMW :D