Fatbobman’s Swift Weekly #045 | We Need More “Wukong”

fatbobman ( 东坡肘子)
6 min readAug 20, 2024

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Weekly Comment

We Need More “Wukong”

Black Myth: Wukong is an action role-playing game developed over several years by the Chinese game studio Game Science, inspired by the classic Chinese novel “Journey to the West”. It was officially released on multiple platforms on August 20th (the same day this weekly newsletter is published).

As the first true AAA game produced by a Chinese game developer, “Wukong” has garnered widespread attention from Chinese players. The game quality showcased before its release has also won the anticipation of players worldwide. During the pre-sale period, sales exceeded 1.2 million copies. Although it still can’t be compared to some famous established IPs, this achievement is already delightful.

On its launch day, “Wukong” broke several records, including the one for the most concurrent players in a paid single-player game on Steam.

Beyond expectations for the game’s quality, as Chinese players, we hope that “Wukong” can bring some positive changes to China’s game industry. As a market that ranks among the top in the world in terms of gaming population and consumption, China has long suffered from a severe imbalance in game types, with mobile and online games occupying the vast majority of market share, while single-player games account for an extremely low proportion.

Since most single-player games adopt a one-time purchase model (not primarily relying on microtransactions), developers usually pay more attention to the integrity of the story and strive to attract user consumption by improving the game’s first impression.

I’m not entirely against non-one-time purchase games. However, whether a game can make consumers continuously invest time, energy, and money should depend on whether it can bring players sustained freshness and good gaming experiences. Yet, in the current market, to stimulate player consumption, the development of many games has completely deviated from the original intention of the word “game”, instead exploiting human weaknesses to create addictive activities. Games are making more money, but they’re also becoming less fun.

Once product development is completely dominated by business thinking, its essence undergoes a huge change. This situation exists not only in the game industry but is also increasingly common in the mobile application field. More and more applications have adopted subscription-based charging methods without offering a one-time purchase option. Compared to the paid update mechanism from a few years ago, the subscription model means that users lose access to the product if they don’t renew, and the spread of this trend undoubtedly increases consumers’ cost burden and the uncertainty of user data.

As Chinese players, we need more works like “Wukong” to improve the market environment. As a consumer of digital products, I also hope that more products can retain the one-time purchase mechanism to reduce user burden and provide guarantees for product and data ownership.

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fatbobman ( 东坡肘子)

Blogger | Sharing articles at https://fatbobman.com | Publisher of a weekly newsletter on Swift at http://https://weekly.fatbobman.com