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author | he yiran, editor | yang lei

"many of my colleagues are playing it, and many young colleagues on km (tencent's intranet community) are arguing about whether tencent can do this or just doesn't want to do it."after the launch of "black myth: wukong", it was like a stone hitting tencent, causing ripples.

regarding this first domestic 3a masterpiece, "some colleagues said that the level design is not very good, and the appearance of some bosses is a bit disgusting, but it does not prevent it from being a milestone product like "the wandering earth 1"."

on the morning of august 20, the console game "black myth: wukong", based on "journey to the west" and produced by youke interactive, was officially launched and quickly topped the steam best-selling game list. in addition to the game platform, major official media and social networking sites were almost all dominated by this slightly ferocious-looking wukong. many offline stores, including luckin coffee, launched co-branded products at the same time. the marketing linkage across all platforms drove the popularity of the game to rise steadily.

the popularity is not limited to the domestic market, the overseas market is also outstanding.

many big youtube gaming anchors started live broadcasts on the launch day, and overseas review media also gave it wide acclaim. some overseas players even started studying "journey to the west" in order to understand the settings. even the usually harsh bloomberg shouted that chinese game manufacturers "made history."

according to official news, as of 21:00 on august 23, the maximum number of concurrent online users of "black myth: wukong" across all platforms exceeded 3 million, and sales exceeded 10 million copies.

based on the minimum selling price of 268 yuan, the game's revenue has approached 3 billion yuan. judging from the sales in the first week, the figures are comparable to the most popular console games in the global market in recent years, "red dead redemption 2" and "the legend of zelda: kingdom of tears". goldman sachs even believes that the cumulative sales of "black myth" may reach 20 million copies. in addition to being a big seller, the game's reputation has also been quite good, with a comprehensive score of 82 points on metacritic, which is an excellent result.

"black myth: wukong" is therefore hailed as "the first truly domestic 3a masterpiece." the so-called 3a refers to "high cost, high volume, and high quality."

however, this "milestone product" that became popular all over the internet was not born in tencent, which made some young tencent game people feel a little disappointed. "the moon landing plan in the past few years now feels a little bit unfinished. that was the time when tencent was closer to 3a."

01

in fact, "black myth: wukong" is a game with tencent blood.

the producers of black myth, feng ji and yang qi, both came from tencent. in fact, black myth: wukong was actually inspired by the journey to the west-themed pc game douluo dalu that they made when they were at tencent.

as early as 2008, tencent implemented the game studio system, and quantum studio came into being. at that time, the studio's r&d team exceeded 400 people. it was tencent's first self-developed studio. tencent had high hopes for the studio, expecting it to make high-quality games. for this reason, the studio shouted the slogan of "attaching great importance to player needs and giving the highest priority to player interests."

after the studio was established, it produced a number of games such as "qq fantasy world" and "qq xianxia zhuan", but these games were obviously not the masterpieces that tencent expected. at that time, tencent was preparing to use its own engine "atom" to create a 2.5d self-developed online game. after the company's executives saw the journey to the west theme planning proposal written by feng ji, the operator of "xunxian", they promoted him to be the chief planner of this new project.

it cannot be said that tencent has never had a dream or never wanted to make a big production.

the article in "entrepreneur" wrote: within tencent, "douluo dalu" was highly anticipated from top to bottom, because in order to reverse the public's bad impression of their own products, they "didn't want to make money from this game, they just wanted word of mouth."

“we don’t want to make money, we just want word of mouth” may be what impressed feng ji and yang qi. tencent also gave them a lot of autonomy and investment. douzaishen took 5 years to develop, which is more than three times the time of tencent’s general products.

the popularity of the promotional video of "black myth: wukong" in 2020 was similar to that of the promotional video of "god of war" in 2013. in 2013, "god of war" launched a promotional cg film "the invasion of ten thousand monsters". the promotional film borrowed scenes from "avatar", was pre-shot by the "avatar" team, and produced by the top domestic team atom animation. it is said that the production of this film requires tens of millions of dollars. there are great disagreements within tencent. finally, a senior executive decided, "for the reputation of the game, it is worth a gamble."

even the instant popularity after the launch was similar. from the launch of douzhengshen to the end of 2013, the number of simultaneous online users exceeded 600,000, so that the production team's update speed could not keep up with the speed of players "playing the game". some players could not wait and even went to the bottom of the tencent building to block feng ji.

the success was too dazzling. "douluo dalu" was regarded by tencent as a representative work of the next generation of products, and it even announced that it would focus on the three major matrices of literature, film and television, and games.

but things changed at that time. the fourth version of douzhengshen, "city of monsters", was updated, and the treasure pavilion system was launched, which increased the level of "paying gold". the reputation of the game plummeted, and in the later period it completely became a pay-to-win online game. it was no longer "not wanting to make money, but only wanting reputation", but the other way around.

in this way, douzheng, which was supposed to be a masterpiece, fell into the abyss step by step. in june 2014, feng ji, yang qi and other core team members chose to resign, and these more than 40 employees of the original quantum studio established a small studio, namely "youke interactive".

no one knows exactly what happened between the production team of "douluo dalu" and tencent. we only know that the first three chapters of "douluo dalu" are classics, and "after the bones, there is no more journey to the west."

02

the failure of "douluo dalu" did not have much impact on the subsequent development of tencent games. it can even be said that tencent withdrew from pc games and went all in on mobile games, which led to its current status.

in 2014, china's smartphone shipments reached 389 million units, with a smartphone market share of 86%. the combined monthly active accounts of wechat and wechat reached 500 million, an increase of 41% over the same period last year. relying on the phenomenal mobile game "honor of kings", tianmei studio rose rapidly.

that year, the structure of tencent game studio was reorganized again, and tencent's self-research direction completely turned to mobile games. quantum studio was split and merged with lightspeed studio, qq game chess and card team, etc. to become photon studio. later, photon studio used unreal engine 4 to develop the mobile tactical competitive mobile game "peace elite", which also became a phenomenal mobile game. together with "honor of kings", it became the "twin stars" of tencent mobile games.

tencent has a large number of high-quality mobile games in the mobile era, and it must be credited with its decisive switch from pc games to mobile games.

from the popularity of black myth: wukong today, we can see that tencent missed the opportunity. after all, compared with online games, for a long time, the domestic game industry has been saying that "buyout games are outdated", and most companies are unwilling to invest a lot of money to develop and produce console games.

we were chatting with people in the gaming industry and asked, "why don't big companies make aaa games with buyout options?"

the unanimous answer was: not making money.

although china has long surpassed the united states to become the world's largest game market, the development of aaa games in china has not been smooth for many years. this is certainly due to historical reasons and different consumer habits, as well as the fact that many young people do not have houses or living rooms with large tvs and game consoles, and there are some unspeakable reasons.

in short, the most popular products in the domestic game market are in-app purchase recharge online games that can stimulate users to repeatedly "spend money". no matter how they express their feelings at the beginning, they will eventually take the "spend money" route. the console game field, which is mainly based on buyout stand-alone games, has been weak for many years. for most people, when it comes to domestic stand-alone games, perhaps the first reaction is still "the legend of sword and fairy" in the 1990s.

the serious imbalance in the development of mobile games and console games has also put domestic gamers in a contradictory state: on the one hand, they look down on the production level of domestic console games and believe that there is no soil for the development of 3a games in china; on the other hand, they secretly look forward to the emergence of a masterpiece that can prove the production level of domestic games.

such complicated feelings are not difficult to understand. just put yourself in the shoes of chinese fans who are disappointed with the chinese men's football team.

therefore, the emergence of black myth: wukong fulfilled the dreams of game fans, and it was seen as a "champion" for chinese games. after all, 3a games are considered to represent the pinnacle of production in the game industry, and the game community often uses 3a games to measure the true strength of the game industry and companies in various countries.

in comparison, even though tencent's online games earned 48.5 billion yuan in the second quarter, in the eyes of players and even onlookers, it is not as attractive as a 3a game.

in particular, after popular games such as "honor of kings" and "peace elite", tencent has no more phenomenal masterpieces. although "dream star", "dungeon & fighter: origin" and "brawl stars" have a good growth rate, most of the revenue of the game sector benefits from the stable contribution of "old games".

we understand that tencent has very high internal requirements for game revenue, and increases the kpi for revenue every year. driven by the kpi, not only will old games continue to add new content, but they will also increase "pay-to-win points", and when developing new games, they will also be driven by whether they can make money.

in comparison, feng ji revealed his ambition to create a 3a masterpiece at any cost to win the hearts of the game industry, and won the hearts of players and the public opinion. feng ji said that the development cost of players' experience per hour is about 15-20 million yuan. it is conservatively estimated that the development cost of "black myth" is 300-500 million yuan, which will be the domestic console game with the highest r&d cost.

therefore, a wave of "stock buying fans" who hope that domestic 3a games can make a name for themselves immediately joined the "tap water" team, and the fan base sprang up, spontaneously creating momentum for the game.

at this time, tencent games had an annual revenue of hundreds of billions, ranking first in the domestic game industry, but it failed to become the first company to make a 3a masterpiece, which failed the expectation that "the greater the ability, the greater the responsibility."

03

but that doesn’t mean tencent games has lost its ambitions since 2014.

around 2020, tencent launched the mysterious "moon landing project", with the goal of having at least one tencent game rank among the top 10 in the world in the future.

in 2021, tianmei established f1 studio. according to the official introduction, the studio focuses on original 3a, open-world games. then the game project nxs, which is benchmarked against "genshin impact", was also incorporated into f1 studio. he jia, who is in charge of the nxs project, was an early employee of mihoyo. before joining tencent, he served as the technical director of mihoyo and was one of the main creators of "honkai impact 3". the nxs project is highly valued within tencent and was once regarded as a flagship game, with a higher priority than "glory of the king world", which is also part of the "moon landing plan".

at that time, tencent attached great importance to the "moon landing plan". many projects went to the general office for bidding and received financial support. tencent senior vice president ma xiaoyi once publicly stated that tencent had several moon landing projects and "hoped to make a product of the same level as gta and cyberpunk 2077 in 5-8 years."

however, in april 2023, tianmei studio suspended the development of nxs, and the entire team turned to another two-dimensional game project, and he jia also changed his position. at that time, the media reported that the main reason for the suspension of the development of the nxs project was: "the development of the new ue5 engine (the fifth-generation latest game engine, mainly used to create game content and 3d graphics) was too difficult and the progress was not as expected."

for reference, in november 2022, the pjsh team led by mihoyo founder cai haoyu announced its dissolution. the project also used the ue5 engine.

it seems that the 3a ambitions of tencent games and mihoyo have all been put on the ue5 engine.

but "black myth: wukong" is developed based on the ue5 engine.

therefore, the difficulty of developing with the ue5 engine is not necessarily the main reason. we learned that within tencent games, "the influence of the studio boss cannot be ignored. if the studio boss doesn't look at it well, there won't be so many resources."

this goes back to the reason above.driven by revenue kpis and under the requirement to reduce costs and increase efficiency, even if there are ambitions at the group level, each studio group has its own difficulties.

you can think of this as the stubborn disease of large companies that want both: they want you to innovate, but they also want you to reduce costs and increase efficiency. as a result of this struggle, tencent's domestic market game revenue grew 9% year-on-year in the second quarter, but there were no eye-catching or phenomenal blockbusters.

on the contrary, it may be that "the barefoot are not afraid of those wearing shoes". after starting their own businesses, feng ji and yang qi did not forget the story of the young hero retracing his journey to the west, and they regarded creating a 3a game on the theme of journey to the west as their goal.

in 2018, the black myth project was officially launched. yang qi posted a weibo with mixed feelings: "i started to do something big in the new year. it seems that i have been waiting for this day for 10 years in this industry."

although they left tencent, they brought with them tencent's scientific development process, as well as tencent's former ideals and publicity methods.on august 20, 2020, "black myth: wukong" was officially announced, and the official launched a 13-minute actual machine demonstration video. the exquisite pictures and the settings with unique chinese style instantly set off the gaming circle, and the video was played over 10 million times in 24 hours.

just like the grand occasion of "god of war" in the past. since then, "black myth: wukong" has opened special pages on multiple social platforms where the gaming community gathers, and has released real-time videos and trailers from time to time to disclose the production progress, maintaining a very high fan stickiness. this group of "buying fans" has kept the game in the development process highly popular and discussed for the past four years.

in 2023, the unreleased black myth won the best visual effects award at the cologne game show. the overseas word-of-mouth once again aroused the pride of domestic players and brought black myth to the forefront of the gaming community.

the story of black myth is not special. it tells the story of how sun wukong was named fighting buddha after his successful pilgrimage to the west, and disappeared, with his "six roots" scattered all over the place. the player plays the role of "the man of destiny" and embarks on an adventure to find the truth of the legend.

compared to the story, gamers care more about the graphics and immersive experience.

in terms of scene setting, the production team did not make up stories, but selected 36 scenic spots across the country as filming locations, with as many as 27 filming locations in shanxi, the "paradise of ancient buildings". "black myth" also carefully borrowed the characteristics of common religious elements in foreign 3a masterpieces, with countless buddhist elements and two points in the setting. with the blessing of historical heritage, the texture presented by "black myth" is obviously better than its peers.

the anime "dragon ball" has been popular for decades, making the name "wukong" well-known around the world, which greatly reduces the threshold for overseas users to understand the story without having to start from scratch. compared with strategy games, adventure themes are more suitable for displaying environmental settings and cultural connotations. the added value brought by traditional chinese elements is also a new experience for overseas players.

the momentum accumulated over four years has led to the current achievement. the development of black myth is worthy of the efforts of the creative team.

this was supposed to be the goal of the "moon landing project".

in fact, due to its excessive focus on commercial performance, "tencent games' performance has improved slightly this year, but it feels like it is still a long way from making a big bet on 3a."

04

the game quality of black myth: wukong is indeed leading in the industry. big production and big marketing always mean greater risks. if the results do not meet expectations, the "stock buying fans" who feel cheated will automatically turn to "lifelong haters".

it can be said that this is a mature project that has a complete plan for the entire process since its birth. it is not only creative but also well executed. it is hard to say that this is not the foundation laid by the main creative team during their time at quantum studio.

tencent's support for "black myth: wukong" does not stop there. in fact, tencent is one of the shareholders of game science, holding at least 5% and up to 24% of the shares. as early as 2020, when "black myth: wukong" was first released, tencent immediately organized a group to visit and expressed its interest in investing to feng ji. feng ji asked several key questions, including whether the investor would affect product decisions and the company's daily operations, and whether it would seize the distribution and operation rights of the game. in response, tencent made it clear that it would not intervene in these issues and emphasized that "they can regard tencent as non-existent."

feng ji therefore jokingly mentioned that after leaving tencent for many years, he could get their financial support again and did not have to worry about kpi targets.

tencent not only provides money, but also does not interfere with decision-making or control distribution. it also relies on its close relationship with ue5 engine developer epic to provide corresponding technical support for "black myth: wukong" to directly switch to the ue5 engine in the later stage.

it can be said thatit is no exaggeration to say that "black myth: wukong" is the "godson" of tencent games.

tencent games is not without dreams, but it is a little strict with its "own sons", always repeating the "kpi tight ring", while it is more relaxed with its "godsons", allowing them to go out freely.

this may also be forced by reality.

objectively speaking, the domestic game industry has experienced many fluctuations in the past few years. many manufacturers have entered a bottleneck period or even a recession period. any large manufacturer has to tread on thin ice and be cautious.

previously, affected by the restrictions on the issuance of game licenses, game companies have become increasingly cautious. one result is that they have to pay more attention to financial returns, and dare not easily try or postpone high-investment, high-risk blockbusters, and are forced to rely on their past capital.according to the "china game industry report from january to june 2024", the actual sales revenue of my country's self-developed games in the domestic market in the first half of 2024 was 117.736 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 3.32%. the main reason is that the popular top products are gradually entering the user loss period.

feng ji, who believes in the saying "don't bully the poor young man", can take a gamble, but large companies with huge assets are affected by the capital market and policies. in order to survive, the gaming industry has gone overseas. leading companies including tencent, netease, and sanqi interactive entertainment are all building original ip brands overseas and creating a gaming ecosystem. there was a popular saying in the industry that "if you don't go overseas, you're out!"

in 2024, with the issuance of additional game licenses, china's overall game market outlook slowly resumed its positive momentum.

although "black myth: wukong" has given this year's game market a shot in the arm, there is no need to be too optimistic about the overall console market. according to the "china game industry report from january to june 2024",the actual sales revenue of the console game market in the first half of this year was 797 million yuan, and three years ago, this figure was 890 million. because the report does not count the revenue of the stand-alone game market, and the official data may only count the sales data of several major console platforms in china, and does not include data such as hong kong and american versions, but overall, this data has not changed much in the past four years.

according to the steam china best-selling half-yearly chart, excluding the pre-sale performance of black myth: wukong, which ranked first, there were only five domestic buyout games with total sales of over 10 million in the first half of this year, including soul mask, the starving: a thousand miles journey in the late ming dynasty, and mountain and river travel. the total sales of the 2nd to 15th ranked games were 180 million, only one-tenth of black myth: wukong. the market size of buyout games cannot be compared with krypton gold online games.

therefore, it is difficult to say that the popularity of "black myth" can completely drive the rise of domestic 3a blockbusters that are purchased out of the box. it is more likely that after the emergence of "the wandering earth", the only domestic science fiction blockbusters so far are "the wandering earth" series.

sofrom a global perspective, instead of not making continuous efforts on mobile games with a huge market size, and focusing resources and energy on 3a games with a small market size and a high degree of luck, it is better to choose to invest in entrepreneurial teams that dare to take a gamble, provide financial and technical support, which not only shares the financial risks, but also reduces strategic loss of focus.

from this point of view, tencent’s choice is not wrong: you have a dream, okay, i will fully support you, and let’s fly together.

in journey to the west, tang monk removed the seal on sun wukong, and together they went to the west to obtain buddhist scriptures, attained enlightenment and became buddhas, and together they wrote the legend of journey to the west. in black myth: wukong, tencent silently supported youke interactive and made this domestic 3a masterpiece a success.

as feng ji joked when answering questions from netizens on zhihu, "me: you should know very well that even if this game is made, it will definitely not make much money, and may even lose money. goose: i understand. it's not the first day we met. you can't make money even if i ask you to. we just want to do something with long-term value together."

you see, tencent also has its "hot-blooded and immature" moments.