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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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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.