Merciless comparison
Speaking with my colleague Mara Sanvitale, I learned that the Chinese media are well aware of what has been Black Myth: Wukong development costswhich has also become a topic of conversation in Italian podcasts on Chinese culture that do not specifically deal with video games. The data surprised me, as well as intrigued me, because We’re talking about around 65 million dollars for 7-8 years of development (When it was first introduced it had already been in development for years and had passed the pre-production stage, contrary to what many believe).
Among the backers is also the usual Tencent (which however did not publish the game). For which a similar amount is equivalent to a medium-small project (we are talking about the largest video game publisher on the planet). In total It seems that around 200 people worked on it. Doing some online research I found several confirmations of this, which is beyond astonishing. Not that I didn’t trust my source, mind you, but certain numbers put Wukong on a very different level from other video games and show the now unstoppable strength of the Chinese video game market.
Regardless of all other considerations, Black Myth: Wukong is an incredible project for our times: it is a triple-A single-player game developed in China that puts on the table enormous production values for double-A development costs (relative to how much is spent in the West to develop video games). By comparison, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 has far exceeded the 200 million dollar budget, as has Starfield. Not that they don’t know single-player games in China, mind you. Just think of Wuxia (Chinese role-playing games, so to speak), which have been around for decades, to get an idea that certain myths regarding that territory are quite unfounded.
But let’s not digress. To summarize: In China they can produce excellent triple A products like Black Myth: Wukong at about 1/3 – 1/4 of the cost they would have in the West.
As we know, the game sold 10 million copies in 3 days, of which 80% were apparently purchased in China. Now, more or less copies, which means that about 20% of the copies were sold in the West. Making a rough calculation and taking into account only the minimum purchase price on Steam (€59.99), currently in the West alone it would have produced revenues of at least 95,984,000 (a figure already net of the 20% that Steam takes when a certain threshold of overall revenue is exceeded), from which the various taxes will then be subtracted. Unfortunately, we do not have precise data regarding PS5, so approximation by approximation, we left it out of the account. The result is that they could have brought it closer to breaking even (certainly exceeded if we consider Chinese sales).
In short, with Wukong, China has demonstrated not only that it can compete with the West and Japan without any problems, but also that it can do so by spending much less to obtain better results in some fields, where the game has resonated with both local and international audiences. We imagine that this is much more than Game Science dared to hope for.
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