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[Introduction] On August 20, "Black Myth: Wukong" will be unlocked globally and officially launched!

China Fund News reporter Taylor

Brothers and sisters, let’s continue to read some news from home and abroad tonight.

Black Myth: Wukong is a blast

Today, August 20th! Black Myth: Wukong will be unlocked globally at 10:00 am, and players will be able to experience this first truly domestically produced 3A masterpiece.

Since a week ago, this highly anticipated game has frequently appeared on hot searches. "Black Myth: Wukong" is an action-adventure game developed by a game science team with Chinese mythology as the background. The core content is based on the original world view of "Journey to the West".

On June 10, the physical version of "Black Myth: Wukong" officially started pre-sale in full. The simplified Chinese PC standard version is priced at 268 yuan, and the digital deluxe version is priced at 328 yuan. It ranked first in the global weekly sales on the Steam platform from August 6 to 13, 2024.

According to statistics from the global game rating website Metacritic, as of August 18, a total of 54 global media gave the game an average rating of 82 points, among which GamingBolt, God is a Geek, GamersRD and the Chinese game website GamerStar all gave full marks.

The domestic popularity also continued to increase. "Black Myth: Wukong" cooperated with Luckin Coffee to launch a co-branded drink "Black Myth Tengyun Americano", which has sold more than 100,000 copies on the Douyin platform. At the same time, according to Luckin's official Weibo, its limited co-branded poster package was sold out on the morning of August 19.

Its popularity even prompted Luckin Coffee CGO (Chief Growth Officer) Yang Fei to say in his WeChat Moments, "Male purchasing power has overturned the team's perception this morning."

Prior to this, Feng Ji, founder of Game Science, revealed in an interview that the development cost of Black Myth: Wukong was about 15 million to 20 million yuan per player per hour. The team estimated that the overall game time would be more than 15 hours, while the actual development time was more than 1.5 times this time. Based on this, the development cost would be at least 400 million yuan.

According to the latest weekly sales chart of the Steam platform (August 6 to 13, 2024) released by the game company Valve, Black Myth: Wukong pre-orders took the first place in the world. So far, pre-sale sales have exceeded 1.2 million copies, and pre-sale sales have exceeded 400 million yuan.

In addition, at 10 am on August 18, the domestic game "Black Myth: Wukong" officially started preloading.

Preloading is a common practice in the gaming industry, which means that a few days before the game is officially released, players can download most of the game data to their computers in advance, so that players can start playing the game as soon as possible after the game is released, eliminating the lengthy download process.

According to official data from the Steam platform, the pre-load of Black Myth: Wukong caused the Steam download bandwidth to soar to 70Tbps. This is equivalent to more than 70,000 people using 1Gbps downstream bandwidth to download at full speed at the same time, setting a new peak record for download bandwidth usage on Steam.

In comparison, the peak preloading rate of Cyberpunk 2077 at the end of 2020 was 50Tbps.

Huatai Securities analyzed that Black Myth may be a hit, and the recognition of domestic 3A games by global players is a milestone for the Chinese game market. The success of Black Myth proves the breakthrough of domestic self-developed games, which may bring new opportunities to the game industry. It is recommended to pay attention to companies in the game industry chain, including Shenzhou Taiyue, Kaiying Network, Giant Network, Sanqi Interactive Entertainment, Jibit, Perfect World, etc.; the targets related to Black Myth: Wukong include: Zhejiang Media (publisher of Black Myth: Wukong), Huayi Brothers (indirect holding of Game Science), etc.

West Securities said that we believe that "Black Myth: Wukong" also indicates that Chinese game companies have the ability to produce high-quality, high-level 3A masterpieces that can compete in the global market. We pay attention to domestic game manufacturers with strong R&D capabilities and rich product reserves, and recommend Tencent Holdings, NetEase-S, Bilibili-W, X.D. Inc., Giant Interactive, Sanqi Interactive Entertainment, Perfect World, etc.

US stocks rose

Tonight, the three major U.S. stock indexes rose, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average rising by about 200 points and the Nasdaq rising by about 0.5%.

U.S. stocks got off to a turbulent start in August as disappointing data stoked fears of a recession and heightened concerns that the Federal Reserve was lagging on rate cuts. Those developments sparked a global sell-off that pushed the S&P 500 to its worst performance since 2022 on Aug. 5.

But new data last week seemed to calm nervous market sentiment and increase hopes that the economy can achieve a soft landing. Investors saw good data on retail sales and initial jobless claims, and strong earnings from Walmart also boosted market sentiment. More importantly, the annualized inflation rate of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) hit its lowest level in more than three years in July.

Greg Marcus, managing director at UBS Private Wealth Management, said markets have almost fully recovered from the excessive recession fears earlier this month.

Marcus said, "While we remain optimistic overall, we do not think the market will go up in a straight line. The economy is slowing down and there may be a series of contradictory economic data in the coming months, which will continue to fuel the debate about the recession."

Investors are now looking to the upcoming Federal Reserve symposium for insights on the path of interest rates, while raising expectations for an imminent rate cut. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell is set to speak at the central bank symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, on Friday.