한어Русский языкEnglishFrançaisIndonesianSanskrit日本語DeutschPortuguêsΕλληνικάespañolItalianoSuomalainenLatina

Text｜Li Xiaotian, reporter of "Chinese Entrepreneurs"

Editor: Zhang Hao

Image source: Visual China

Will it lead the Chinese gaming industry to become the "world factory"?

In mid-June,Black Myth: Wukong” (hereinafter referred to as “Wukong”) production studio - Game Science invited many media people to their headquarters in Hangzhou for the last “black room trial play”.

Tang Haoming is one of them. He runs a game review account "Tdogegg" with more than 260,000 followers on Bilibili. He has participated in the trial play of "Wukong" many times, and his most intuitive feeling before was that "the quality is indeed solid enough."

The last time he went to the demo, he was just trying to produce some content and dig out more information, but once he got started with the game, he was hooked. Although he is well-informed in the industry, he was still surprised. How could this game evolve so quickly?

Game Science provided each participant with a pen and paper, but throughout the entire process, Tang Haoming hardly wrote anything. He had no time to record any of his feelings during the process.

"I have a fairly good understanding of the overall situation of the domestic game industry. Game Science does not have the development experience and accumulated industrial level, so we all think it's unrealistic to achieve success overnight. But the quality of the game really convinced me, so much so that I think all this is too dreamy," said Tang Haoming.Many UP hosts who went there shed tears. Some cried directly during the trial play, some cried at the dinner party afterwards, and some returned to their rooms and cried secretly in the corner.

It all looked very "magical". Back at the hotel, Tang Haoming suddenly began to doubt whether everything he saw was real or not in the bathroom. He repeatedly asked several UP hosts who were traveling with him, "Is this a dream?"

With only two months left before the game is officially launched, online public opinion is still divided into two distinct factions: the Champagne Party and the Bao Si Party.Tang Haoming considers himself a member of the Champagne Party, that is, people who are so impressed by the fun of the game that they think they can already open champagne to celebrate in advance. The "Bao Si Party" is cautiously waiting and watching, just like the story of playing with princes by lighting beacons, worrying that there is only high enthusiasm but no real skills.

But after this trial play session, many game bloggers began to believe and look forward to the dawn of domestic stand-alone games.

They are the group with the most complicated emotions towards Wukong. Over the years, they have published strategy guides for various overseas masterpieces on major platforms. They envy Sekiro for promoting Japan's traditional Bushido culture to the world, and they also envy the fact that the game industry level in Europe and the United States is high enough to continue to create super IPs such as Tomb Raider and Grand Theft Auto.

Domestic mobile games are already very popular in the international market.Genshin Impact》The number of ID registrations worldwide has exceeded 300 million. However, domestic games have almost no say in the "3A stand-alone masterpieces" that represent the highest level of games. The so-called 3A masterpieces refer to: A lot of money (a lot of development funds), A lot of time (a long development cycle), and A lot of resources (sufficient development resources). Many game enthusiasts, including Tang Haoming, have been facing a pool of "stagnant water" for so long and have become numb.

The Big One

It is not difficult to understand the "mania" in the hearts of all members when the game science team of only a dozen people decided to bet on 3A stand-alone games in 2018.

Yang Qi, the lead artist of "Wukong", once posted a Weibo post: "I feel like I have been waiting for this day for 10 years in this industry. I went out for a meeting in the middle of the night, and the trees in the entire community were calling my name softly."

At that time, Game Science, which had been established for four years, launched two games for the market: the RPG (role-playing game) card mobile game "Hundred Generals" represented by NetEase, and the strategy game "Art of War: Red Tide".

Both games made money, but they also fell into the same dilemma. The former suffered from user loss in less than a year, and Red Tide, which focused on the auto chess mode, was unable to retain players after the popularity of the theme faded.

This kind of game is not what Feng Ji, the founder of Game Science, wants to make. In a long article in 2007, he criticized the negative impact of excessive capital intervention on game production, saying, "In a considerable number of game development teams, the focus of planning is not on how to make the game more fun and richer, but on how to make players addicted."

In the same article, he also expressed his pessimism about the game industry at the time: "If you look carefully into their (game planners') eyes, you can't see the burning flame of idealism in them at all. The closer you are to the planners, the further away you are from the players."

In an interview with Xinhua News Agency, Feng Ji said that making 3A stand-alone games was not an impulsive act. In 2016, the stand-alone game market in the United States exceeded 10 billion US dollars, and in Japan it was about 5 billion US dollars, but why was there only 100 million yuan in China? There is such a large group of game players in China. In 2016, Chinese active users on the well-known stand-alone game platform Steam accounted for one-third.

Feng Ji did not hide his intention to do something big from the beginning. In Game Science's business plan at that time, at least one-third was about the company's plan to make stand-alone games, which was considered "non-mainstream" by the industry.

"Although we all think that we will make a stand-alone game sooner or later, we always feel that the time is not yet ripe. For example, we still need a lot of money," Feng Ji said in an interview in 2020.

Ideals are one thing, and decisions are another. After making enough money to survive from two games, Yang Qi began to actively put the idea of ​​making AAA stand-alone games back on the agenda: "If I don't make something good during the most precious time of my life, I may not have many opportunities in this life."

In 2018, both reason and emotion told Feng Ji that it was time.

Initially, the production team of this stand-alone game had only 13 people, and two years later it expanded to more than 20 people. However, such a team lineup is too "shabby" for the development of 3A stand-alone games. Take the American stand-alone game studio Naughty Dog as an example. The team members of "The Last of Us 2" reached hundreds of people, and the development team of "Uncharted 4" also had more than 200 people.

In the second year of working on Wukong, the team had only created one level, the "Black Wind Mountain". They decided to take the initiative and the moment that changed their destiny came.

Kidnapped

The first actual game demo video released by Game Science on Bilibili became an instant hit, with the number of views of this 13-minute video reaching over a million within a few hours.

In order to avoid other hot news and game events, Game Science deliberately chose August 20, a seemingly calm day. In the following four years, every August 20, Game Science would reveal the latest development progress to players. This day also became a common anniversary for "Wukong" and all the players who follow it. Until this day this year, "Wukong" was officially launched.

Shortly before that video went viral, Tang Haoming had already paid attention to "Wukong".

"A few days before the PV (trailer) was released, Game Science also launched a countdown website. That was the first time I knew about this game. On that website, they showed a few game screens that did not contain much information. At that time, I felt that the screen specifications were not on the same level as previous domestic games, and they were also first-class on the world stage. So I waited for the game PV to be released, but the quality of the game presented by the actual demonstration really shocked me." said Tang Haoming.

Jihe.com, a leading domestic game platform, was extremely cautious and conservative in its initial attitude towards Wukong. "The clips of the game at that time made us feel very amazing and unreal," Jihe.com editor Bai Guangda told China Entrepreneur.

He said: "Many projects in the industry will adopt this approach, making a trailer that shows the technical strength and game design capabilities, but the effectiveness in actual execution and advancement is difficult to evaluate, and in the end the project stagnates or even ends in vain. This is very common."

The unexpected popularity caught Feng Ji off guard. He originally just wanted to make a "recruitment video" to solve the problem of manpower, and put a sentence at the end of the video: "After the bones, I will go west again. Join the team to obtain scriptures and visit now." The recruitment effect was indeed immediate, and tens of thousands of resumes were received within a week. But the "added value" was more obvious, and then there came investors holding large sums of cash seeking cooperation, and Feng Ji's anxiety.

At 5 p.m. on the day the video was released, Game Science held a full-staff meeting, where he said:"The level shown in the game is Black Wind Mountain, which is the 11th level in the original Journey to the West, and there are 70 more levels to go. We have only come a little way, but suddenly we find ourselves being praised as 'Sun Wukong'. There are too many things in this world that are praised too much at the beginning and end up being short-lived, starting high and ending low."

But the dream start still boosted the morale of the team. That night, Feng Ji booked a local theater in Hangzhou for team building and invited all colleagues involved in the development. During the commercial break before the show, the audience saw the PV of "Wukong" on the big screen for the first time. This may be a deliberate act by Feng Ji, who just wanted to let the group of partners know what he was doing.

At Game Science's internal annual meeting that year, he no longer concealed the fact that Game Science's vision was to become the world's number one ARPG (a game that combines elements of action games, role-playing games, and adventure games) game developer.

But to the outside world, Game Science has been cooling down "Wukong". Feng Ji wrote on Weibo that this is a project that does not involve publicity and promotion. Domestic stand-alone games have been difficult to produce for a long time, and domestic players are eagerly waiting. He is facing a slightly "abnormal" market state.

In an interview with Xinhua News Agency, Feng Ji admitted that in the past few years, he has been "kidnapped" by the expectations of the outside world and has been in extreme anxiety."The outside world has constructed an 'imagined community' for us: an image without flaws, overly perfect, and carrying all the resentment and hope of the past. This is an external filter, but to be honest, our game also has an imperfect, ugly, and not-so-good-looking side."

They are "Wukong"

The popularity has never dissipated in the past 4 years.

The turning point of Jihe Network's attitude towards this project occurred in 2021. "From the perspective of traditional culture, and based on our understanding of the original work and its historical background, we judged that they were no longer satisfied with making an ordinary action game, but hoped to integrate Chinese traditional culture into it. In the following years, as we got to know the company and the project better and had close contact with them, this judgment became more and more firm." Bai Guangda said.

Jike.com is also one of the first partners to launch joint products with "Wukong", including the "Monkey Heart" series of clothing. A T-shirt priced at 198 yuan has sold more than 2,000 pieces.

"Game Science is a company with a strong mission and is composed of a group of pragmatic and down-to-earth idealists," said Bai Guangda.

During the last trial play, Bai Guangda wrote a lot of things in his notes on Game Science. "In the final stage of development, the opinions of professional reviewers are crucial. At that time, I thought that if I could make more suggestions and find more bugs (loopholes), the subsequent release would be smoother."Bai Guangda wrote an entire page on that loose-leaf notebook, and he and Feng Ji communicated about these suggestions for nearly an hour.

"He tore off that page and took it away. In the official version, many of the issues I raised were corrected," said Bai Guangda.

Tang Haoming had a similar impression of the Game Science team: "From the beginning, I felt that they were a down-to-earth, low-key and highly capable team, or in other words, they were very patient. After the first PV ignited the player community, they did not choose to expand their influence while the momentum was high, but instead declined almost all interviews."

At 10 o'clock on August 20, Li Yun, who had been waiting for "Wukong" to be released, was in a complicated mood. Players on Baidu Tieba like to call the four years of waiting a long love affair with "Wukong". Now he has finally got his chance to embrace the beauty and get a glimpse of her beautiful face under the red veil.

On that day, "Wukong" exploded the entire network, and the domestic gaming industry had never seen such a scene. Luckin Coffee launched a co-branded "Tencent American Coffee", and Li Yun waited for almost two hours before getting it. The previous delivery time rarely exceeded half an hour.

Luckin Coffee CGO Yang Fei posted on WeChat Moments: The surrounding products across the country were sold out in seconds, and the system almost crashed. "The male purchasing power overturned the team's cognition this morning, which is more reliable than 10 Father's Days."

On a broader level, the media has placed "Wukong" in the same important position as the domestic science fiction film "The Wandering Earth" - it is a step from 0 to 1 for domestic 3A games. Feng Ji mentioned in the interview: Compared with reaching Lingshan, it is more important to embark on the journey to obtain scriptures.

"There was a view in the industry before that once our country's game industry has grown as a whole, the world's game development industry will naturally shift to us. Because the development costs of high-standard games in the West are now a bit out of control, and games are a commodity with a high degree of globalization. So when the quality remains the same, the side with lower costs will have higher profits. And in terms of cost, our country has a huge advantage," said Tang Haoming.

In his opinion, if the commercial success of "Wukong" can attract more domestic teams to invest, one day in the future, "we will become the world factory of the game industry."

Station B gaming blogger “Smart Roadblock” played through the media-banned version of “Wukong” and did not cry during the entire game, but when he saw the list of producers, tears welled up in his eyes."With just such a small number of people, there's not even enough time to play a song. What kind of belief supports you to keep going? How can 100 people make such an incredible game?"

After a busy day, Bai Guangda wrote the following: "It makes us realize that there are many people in the world who work hard and do things seriously, and they can make a name for themselves through unremitting efforts."

References:

The producer of "Black Myth: Wukong" accepted an exclusive interview with Guanwang: Telling a Chinese story with world-class standards, Guancha.com

Now I am in my prime: How game science created "Black Myth: Wukong", Touch Music Network

Exclusive interview: "Black Myth: Wukong", a group of "gods" on their "journey to the West", Trend News

Who murdered our game, Feng Ji