Today, "Black Myth: Wukong" was officially launched.

As the game with the greatest potential to impact the AAA market in China, "Black Myth: Wukong" (hereinafter referred to as "Black Myth") has emerged and has also brought its developer Game Science into the public eye.

As the public digs deeper into the creative team of "Black Myth", it's impossible to ignore Tencent.

Previously, Wall Street News mentioned that Game Science founder Feng Ji (Youka) and chief artist Yang Qi were both core members of Tencent's "War God" project, and Tencent also completed a strategic investment in Game Science in March 2021, holding about 5% of its equity.

As China's largest game developer, Tencent has been laying out AAA games for a long time, and has even invested heavily in marketing for self-developed quality games, but it has not stirred up much attention.

As the popularity of "Black Myth" continues to spread, Tencent's love-hate relationship with standalone games in recent years has also come to the surface.

Tencent faces the demise of standalone games and wants to be the "key".

Standalone games have always been a "black hole" for Chinese game developers.

Since the era of mobile internet, Chinese mobile games have been on the road of "always imitating, always surpassing", and have successfully gone abroad in recent years, realizing the dream of dominating the mobile terminal. However, domestic developers do not have the upper hand in quality games for PC and console, and are even weak.

For the domestic game market around 2000, AAA games meant high investment, large expenditures, little profit, and faced rampant piracy. The "pay-before-you-play" business model was not as profitable as online and mobile games.

Therefore, the industry's general perception of standalone game production at the time was "expensive and not rewarding": not making standalone games is equal to charity.

According to relevant data, as of 2020, domestic standalone game sales accounted for less than 0.5% of total game sales.

Tencent also realized the blank market of standalone games at this time and chose to go against the tide.

In June 2020, Tencent released a brand new open-world first-person shooter called "SYN" at its annual game conference, and demo gameplay was publicly shown.

Game critic Zhang Shule explained to the Time Financial that this was a decision made by Tencent in consideration of filling its gaps:

"Whether or not there are good standalone games is often the key to measuring the real strength and player recognition of a gaming company. Tencent's gaming empire is built solely on revenue, not research and development strength. This is precisely the gap that Tencent needs to fill if it wants to become a top global game company."

Some believe that Tencent's decision to expand its standalone game territory is largely inspired by Microsoft.

Although Microsoft is the world's largest operating system developer, a large portion of its revenue actually comes from games, primarily single-player games on its Xbox platform.

It is reported that the number of Xbox users is far lower than Tencent's WeGame, but it can achieve almost the same level of revenue as Tencent's gaming business, which means that the standalone game market is not unprofitable.

In addition, the development trend of the domestic standalone game market has also emerged in recent years. In early 2012, the domestic standalone game "Dyson Sphere Program", which had only been online for a week, sold 0.35 million copies, and as of April 2021, the game "Guigu Ba Huang" had sold more than 2 million copies since its release.

Obviously, the potential of the domestic single-game market is huge, it's just lacking the key to unlock it.

The road of self-research once stopped at "Doushin: The Giant God".

A vision from Tencent to enter the single-game market: to make boutique self-research games.

In 2008, Tencent, which had already made profits in its gaming business, decided to develop its own products and established eight game studios. Feng Ji and Yang Qi joined the Quantum studio after joining Tencent, and in 2009, they headed the project for "Doushin: The Giant God".

Like "Black Myth: Wu Kong," "Doushin: The Giant God" also has elements of oriental culture, epic narration, and the IP of Sun Wukong. The project was highly anticipated during the planning stage by the management.

According to previous reports, Tencent's internal positioning for this game was "not to make money, but to earn good word-of-mouth," showing its importance.

But things didn't go as planned.

As an MMORPG online game, "Doushin: The Giant God" requires a high frequency of content updates, which conflicts with the team's expertise in single-player game styles. The slow update speed of the production team can't keep up with the speed of players' "grinding," resulting in extremely unstable quality in subsequent versions of the game and a continuous decline in user data, followed by a barrage of criticisms.

In the last episode of the documentary "The Making of Doushin: The Giant God," Feng Ji half-jokingly said:

"The worst part was before the Spring Festival. At that time, the Lion Camel City had just come out, and I was nervous every day. There were probably more than 20 players waiting for me downstairs at the company, and I heard that some people had already blocked the entrance to my residential community."

The high-profile failure of "Doushin: The Giant God" seemed to set the tone for "China can't produce AAA games."

In 2014, when Tencent adjusted its studio architecture, the Quantum Studio and the Lightspeed Studio merged into the Photon Studio Group. Feng Ji and Yang Qi chose to leave and start their own business, forming Game Science.

Insufficient research and development, made up with investment.

In order to make a living, Game Science successively released two games in 2015 and 2017: "Bai Jiang Hang" and "Chizhou," respectively a card game and a real-time competitive game. The former was once referred to as the shanzhai version of "DOTA".

But the team did not forget their original intention of leaving Tencent to make high-quality single-player games.

In 2018, Game Science quickly formed a single-player project team in Shenzhen and moved to Hangzhou at the end of the second year, marking the official development of "Black Myth: Wu Kong."

In August 2020, Game Science released actual gameplay footage of "Black Myth: Wu Kong." It quickly caused a sensation in the gaming community, topping the Bilibili popular list within two hours of release and instantly becoming a hot topic on Weibo, Zhihu, and Douyin and other social media sites.

During this period, Tencent did not stop exploring self-researched games and has been in contact with Game Science.

In March 2021, Tencent completed its investment in Game Science and promised the "Three Nos" principle in this investment: not to intervene in management decisions, not to grab the project's lead, and not to seek distribution and operation.

Tencent stated:

The main purpose is still to help the old colleagues successfully complete the project, without deliberately pursuing any commercial return.

In addition to financial support, Tencent also provided technical support to the creative team. In 2012, Tencent invested in Epic Games and had a long-term technical cooperation with the Epic team. It owns multiple projects developed using the Unreal Engine. The game engine used in "Black Myth" is also developed using the Unreal Engine, and it also received technical support from Tencent during the development period.

However, the news of Tencent investing in Game Science still caused a lot of negative public opinion. Feng Ji explained on Zhihu later:

"The road we choose is not easy, so all those who identify with our values and are willing to help us achieve our dreams, whether it's people, technology or capital, we will engage with them seriously and accept them with conditions on the premise of adhering to independence and autonomy, and we hope to get everyone's understanding."

According to Feng Ji's statement, Tencent did not intervene in Game Science's daily operations or intend to lead the distribution and operation of "Black Myth" in this cooperation. It completely complied with the "three not" principle, and the only purpose was to help the team "successfully complete the development of "Black Myth", and said: This industry really needs such products.

For Tencent, filling the puzzle of "single-player games" may be more important than the game itself.

As Feng Ji said:

"Setting foot on the location road is more important than reaching Ling Shan."

Currently, according to the enterprise check information, Feng Ji is the actual controller of Game Science, holding a 38.76% stake; the second and third largest shareholders are Shenzhen Youke Interactive Enterprise Management Center and Shenzhen Youke Research and Development Enterprise Management Center, respectively, with a shareholding ratio of 27.36% and 9.88%, and the actual controller is also Feng Ji, meaning that Feng Ji holds a total of 76% of the shares.

In addition, Hero Entertainment holds a 19% stake in Game Science through its subsidiary Tianjin Hero Financial Technology Co., Ltd. (Huayi Brothers Media Corporation holds a 5.7% stake in Hero Entertainment); Tencent holds a 5% stake through its subsidiary.

Editor/Lambor