The first 3A game in Chinese history, Black Myth: Wukong, was officially launched on Tuesday (August 20), with sales of over 4.5 million copies across all platforms and sales of over 1.5 billion yuan. After the good news came out, the WUKONG meme coin (Black Myth WuKong) once soared by nearly 100%, and then gave up the gains and reported at $6.03.

According to the statistics of the best-selling list of domestic games, as of now, "Black Myth: Wukong" has sold more than 3 million copies on Steam. Together with WeGame, Epic and PS platforms, the total sales volume has exceeded 4.5 million copies, with total sales exceeding 1.5 billion yuan. Currently, the game's Steam positive review rate remains at 95%, of which Chinese reviews account for about 90%.

Black Myth: Wukong is an action role-playing game based on the classic novel Journey to the West, developed by Chinese game developer Game Science using the Unreal 5 engine. The pre-load was opened on Tuesday, causing the Steam download bandwidth to soar to 70 Tbps, breaking the 50 Tbps record set by Cyberpunk 2077 at the end of 2020.

Due to its high development cost and long development cycle, the game is hailed as China's first 3A masterpiece and is highly anticipated by Chinese players, who call it "the light of domestic games" and claim it to be the Chinese version of "God of War" and "Elden Ring". Players will play the role of Sun Wukong, a character in Chinese mythological novels, and defeat the monsters that are wreaking havoc on the world.

It is reported that Game Science was founded in June 2014 and has a close relationship with Tencent. The company's founding team all came from Tencent, and the main creative team mainly came from Tencent's terminal and mobile game projects such as "Dragon in the Sky", "QQ Huaxia" and "Aircraft War". For example, the company's founder Feng Ji was a core member of Tencent's "God of War" project, which was also built on the big IP of Sun Wukong.

Tencent is one of the sponsors of Game Science. After the release of the demo video of Black Myth: Wukong, Tencent immediately organized a team to conduct research and subsequently acquired a 5% stake in Game Science through capital increase. It is estimated that Tencent’s investment in Game Science is likely to exceed 200 million yuan.

This investment is different from the previous ones. Tencent promised not to interfere with the "three no" principle of business decision-making. Game Science will continue to operate independently and its autonomy will not be affected. In addition to the strategic investment from Tencent, in May 2017, Game Science received a 60 million yuan investment from Hero Entertainment (now known as Hero Games), which raised the valuation of Game Science to 300 million yuan.

Chinese netizens are generally satisfied with Black Myth: Wukong. Some netizens even speculated that the number of online users of Black Myth: Wukong has exceeded 1.4 million, 400,000 higher than the peak of 2077. Isn't it possible that the number of online users will reach 2 million by the weekend night? The only suspense is whether it can break the 3 million record of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds.

But at the same time, the gaming community also had doubts about Black Myth: Wukong, with some saying "The combat in Black Myth is boring, it's just a stick from beginning to end, I wonder if there will be any changes later?", "The experience mainly relies on exploring and picking up monster skills", "Sekiro also uses only a sword from beginning to end. To be honest, I prefer the feeling of trying new weapons in other Souls games, but it's not bad if a weapon is well made", etc.

With the high popularity of “Black Myth: Wukong”, the WUKONG meme coin also rose, reaching a high of $10.67 at one point, with an increase of nearly 100%, but then fell back to $6.03.