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How China’s first AAA game Wukong Became One of the Fastest Selling Games in History
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this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
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love how commenters around here haven't wasted any time to downplay the success and zeitgeist surrounding this game.
Because the article completely ignores the source of the sales volume it keeps mentioning and is pretending the sale is some runaway success in the west instead of acknowledging the reality that it's doing moderate sales here.
Moderate sales is a good first effort, but ignoring the actual market altering affect it will have to pretend it's actually a giant outside of China completely undermines the article.
I'm not sure I'm understanding this correctly, the prerequisite for a video game to be a "runaway success" is to do well sales-wise in the west? Why is the source of sales that important when the article mainly praises and discusses the game's launch figures, behind-the-scenes, the studio's lore, etc.... like any other video game articles do? The author isn't suggesting the sales are doing well in the west, so what warrants discussion of the games' sales in the west in the first place?
The article's headline alone says it's "One of the Fastest Selling Games In History". If we take the revenue value in the article to be true ($852 million in revenue in 2 weeks), then it beats Elden Ring by around a $100 million, give or take, in the first 2-week period (I'm assuming each copy costed 59.99$, so 12 million copies roughly translates to $720 million in revenue, since actual figures were never revealed, I think).
The article also states that it sold 10 million units in the first week, oh wait actually, that's 10 million in 3 days, beating other games that took at least a month to reach a similar milestone.
Because the whole premise of the article is the "global" impact and bringing Chinese culture to a "global audience" when only a small fraction of its sales are outside China.
The actual impact it's going to have is much less on the development of AAA games by Chinese studios and much more as a demonstration of the Chinese market's interest in single player games.
Maybe you didn't realize, but by volume, sales in the west for BMWukong were stellar. >4M sales volume (76% of 17.8 million sales were chinese) is performing well by any standard. It dwarfs the sales volumes of other recently popular Chinese titles, taking the top spot for sales in the west handily. Other games like the GuJiang series, dyson sphere program, the matchless kungfu, crimson snow, tale of immortal had substantially fewer players despite getting nearly universally positive reviews. This is the definition of breakout success, when you reach a new market.
For reference, this game is selling in the west as well as street fighter 6 and guilty gear strive, games that are performing far above a previous genre standard.
The whole premise of the article? There's 2 statements in the entire article that you've highlighted, a rather long and lengthy article about the development and history behind the game developer. Your statements of "what the article is saying" is completely false,
where does it say this?
Article clearly states it's sales, touches on the current chinese population use of steam, I'm not sure what you're saying should be the "correct" thing that would satisfy you. Maybe you could provide an example?
That's a valid statement with a lot of factors (younger generations play more multiplayer). It wasn't the scope of this article to break down consumer purchasing trends within a category (this thing is already long enough).
This seemed like a very milquetoast level style of an article highlighting the success and development of a game studio, I suppose everyone complains in the gaming industry now adays (myself included) so I'll take your negativity more as a "gamer" thing than just hating on something not from the west. I'm rather glad to be exposed to news articles on here that aren't NA eccentric that I'm always reading. Them not highlighting and differentiating themselves from the western market has seemed to gotten you into a hissy fit.
The "fastest selling" is literally the title of the article, then they make no effort at all to point out that all of that volume is from accessing China, which most games don't.
There's no legitimate way to use the title "how game became the fastest selling game" and ignore the only factor that played any meaningful role in that outcome at all.