After Black Myth Wukong, Chinese action games emerge as a new global force

On August 20, 2024, Black Myth: Wukong (Game Science) shattered Steam's concurrent player records with over 2.4 million players at peak. Within days, the action-RPG inspired by Journey to the West became the best-selling Chinese game in medium history. Eighteen months later, the shockwave hasn't subsided—it's transformed into a tidal wave. The Chinese video game industry, long confined to free-to-play MMOs and mobile gacha games, is now perceived as a credible threat in premium action gaming. This report seeks to understand why, map what's coming, and measure what it concretely means for the entire global market.

Twenty years of quiet catching up

To understand Game Science's eruption onto the world stage, you have to go back to the state of China's video game industry in the early 2000s. At that time, the market was dominated by imported Korean MMOs—Lineage II (NCSoft, 2003), Mu Online (Webzen, 2001)—and local developers focused on culturally adapted clones to capture internet café players. The logic was economic before creative: maximize retention, monetize playtime, ignore exports.

This model generated gigantic companies—Tencent, NetEase, miHoYo—but didn't produce a culture of premium narrative action gaming. For two decades, studios wanting to make serious action games looked toward Japan (FromSoftware, Platinum Games), toward the United States (Santa Monica Studio, Naughty Dog), and copied, learned, and appropriated mechanics. This quiet catching-up, made of failed projects and talent trained abroad or on imported engines, constitutes the exact soil on which Black Myth: Wukong grew.

Game Science itself was founded in 2014 by former Tencent employees who rejected free-to-play constraints. For seven years, the studio worked in relative obscurity, publishing spectacular gameplay videos that circulated on Bilibili before reaching Western forums. The result of this long labor, released in 2024, isn't a stroke of luck: it's the culmination of an entire generation of developers who wanted to prove something.

The Soulslike model as learning ground

We can't sidestep the question of creative debt. Black Myth: Wukong owes enormously to FromSoftware—to Dark Souls (2011), to Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (2019) in particular. Stamina management, reading enemy patterns, punishing impatience: all of this is directly inherited from Hidetaka Miyazaki's laboratory. Game Science never really denied it, and that's not a criticism—it's an observation about how major cultural influences circulate through the industry.

What's remarkable is how the studio used this mechanical framework to inject radically different iconography into it. The mythology of Journey to the West—written by Wu Cheng'en in the sixteenth century—offers a bestiary, cosmology, and narrative structure that Western players didn't know, and that Chinese players recognized intimately. This dialectic between universal mechanics and local cultural substrate explains the game's dual success: it was accessible to Soulslike veterans and simultaneously charged with added meaning for a Chinese audience. The Soulslike served as a vehicle, not a destination.

This strategy of appropriation-transcendence isn't unique to Game Science. You see it in miHoYo's trajectory with Genshin Impact (2020), which digested Breath of the Wild conventions (Nintendo, 2017) to redress them in anime-gacha aesthetics. The difference is what Black Myth claims: a premium game, with no monetization safety net, meant to be judged on gaming and artistic merit alone.

Who's next? Status of studios in development

The question agitating the industry for eighteen months is simple: who comes next? Several titles are in development at Chinese studios and explicitly target the global premium action gaming market. Without claiming exhaustiveness—the landscape evolves fast and announcements multiply—you can identify a few structuring projects.

Lost Soul Aside (UltiZero Games) might be the oldest of these files. Started in 2016 as a solo project by Yang Bing, the game was spotted by Sony, which handles PlayStation distribution. Its Final Fantasy XV aesthetic crossed with ultra-fluid hack-and-slash generated considerable hype capital, but the project struggles to find a firm release window. That Sony bet on it remains a strong signal: major Western publishers know Chinese studios now represent a pipeline of creativity, not just a subcontracting zone.

Other projects circulate, less publicized, carried by teams from miHoYo, Lilith Games, or independent studios formed in the wake of Game Science's success. What's structurally new is that Black Myth's success has made Chinese investors much more willing to finance exportable premium action games. The spillover effect is real, even if its concrete results will take several more years to reach global platforms.

The question of cultural identity: folklore or market exoticism?

Black Myth: Wukong's success immediately reignited a fundamental debate: to what extent is Chinese cultural identity a commercial asset, and to what extent does it risk becoming mere folkloric window dressing designed to seduce a West seeking validated exoticism?

The question deserves to be posed without hypocrisy. Journey to the West is a canonical work of world literature, but its representation in Black Myth remains filtered through aesthetic and narrative choices that privilege spectacle over original literary complexity. Sun Wukong is less Wu Cheng'en's philosophically rich, ambiguous character than a vehicle for cinematic action. That's not a betrayal—it's an adaptation—but it raises the question of what future Chinese games will choose to tell about their own culture.

A symmetrical risk exists: studios, having identified classical mythology as an exportable label, content themselves with recycling the same figures—the Monkey King, Nezha, the Eight Immortals—without deepening. It would be equivalent to seeing all Japanese games reduced to samurai and ninjas after Ghost of Tsushima's success (Sucker Punch Productions, 2020). China's cultural richness—its regional traditions, ethnic minorities, urban modernity—offers narrative territory infinitely vaster than what the first cycle of "post-Wukong" games seems ready to explore.

The technical stakes: engines, tools, and technological sovereignty

Black Myth: Wukong runs on Unreal Engine 5. This pragmatic, efficient choice illustrates a dependency China's industry actively seeks to reduce. In a geopolitical context where Sino-American relations remain tense, the question of technological sovereignty in video game development is less trivial than it might appear.

Several Chinese studios and academic institutions are working on proprietary engines. Cocos (Cocos Technologies), widely used for mobile development, aims to move upmarket. Internal engines exist at Tencent and miHoYo—Hoyoverse uses its own rendering pipeline for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail—but their maturity for triple-A action games comparable to what Unreal Engine 5 enables remains to be publicly demonstrated.

This dependency on American tools isn't purely a strategic issue: it has concrete consequences for licensing costs, access to training, and ability to deeply customize production pipelines. China's next major action games will have to choose between Unreal's efficiency and the sovereignty of homegrown tools. That choice will say much about the sector's real industrial maturity.

Western reception: between genuine enthusiasm and latent condescension

Western criticism of Black Myth: Wukong was generally positive but shot through with revealing tensions. Some publications emphasized the "finally, a major Chinese game" angle, framing their praise in a tone of surprise that, unintentionally, said something about their starting prejudices. Being praised for "finally" accomplishing what others have done for decades is a form of condescension disguised as compliment.

Other, more targeted critiques addressed real issues: linearity in certain levels, difficulty balance problems, narrative sometimes too cryptic for those unfamiliar with the source mythology. These critiques were legitimate and treated as such by a large part of the audience. What's significant is that the game was judged on its intrinsic merits rather than excused because of its origin—a sign that the gaming community, at least, wasn't practicing a double standard.

The question remains open for following titles. Black Myth's success created a curiosity capital toward Chinese action games: the next ones will be expected, scrutinized, sometimes with excessive goodwill (novelty effect), sometimes with compensatory severity (critical backlash). Navigating this biased reception space will be one of the editorial challenges for studios that follow.

What Japanese and Western industry must take from this—now

The emergence of China's premium action game industry isn't an abstract threat to FromSoftware, Santa Monica Studio, or CD Projekt Red. It's concrete competitive pressure that will intensify over the next five years. The right question isn't "how do we block this?" but "what does this force us to do better?"

For Japanese studios, the stake is not being overtaken by competitors who learned from their own works. FromSoftware invented a language—the Soulslike—and that language is now fluently spoken by teams in Beijing and Shanghai. The answer can't be to patent a genre; it must be to go further, to find new grammars. Elden Ring (FromSoftware, 2022) already showed this capacity for evolution; it must continue.

For Western publishers, the stake is recognizing that the creative talent pipeline is no longer exclusively localized in Northern Europe, the United States, and Japan. Sony Interactive Entertainment understood this by supporting Lost Soul Aside. Microsoft, with its massive acquisitions from 2022 to 2024, bet on a different strategy—consolidate existing Western strength rather than source emerging Asian talent. This strategic divergence will produce very different results by 2030, and it's uncertain that mega-acquisition logic is most relevant in this new context.

The industry must also reflect on what Black Myth's success says about global audience expectations: a seventy-dollar action game, with no season pass, no battle pass, no post-purchase monetization, can still sell tens of millions of copies. This obvious truth—that the premium model works when the product is excellent—deserves to be stated loudly in boardrooms that have sometimes forgotten this fundamental principle.

What's actually happening: don't fight the wrong battle

The debate over "who'll be the next Black Myth" is partly a false trail. It assumes China's industry will produce clones of the first success, that the marked path will be followed identically. It misunderstands the sector's actual dynamics. The real change isn't that a second Chinese studio will exactly reproduce Game Science's formula—it's that China's entire premium production ecosystem is professionalizing at a speed outside observers systematically underestimate.

The next major Chinese action games may not resemble Black Myth: Wukong. They could draw from other genres—Devil May Cry 5-style hack-and-slash (Capcom, 2019), The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom-style action-adventure (Nintendo, 2023)—or invent hybrids no one anticipates yet. What's certain is that China didn't produce an exceptional game by accident. It produced an industry capable of producing others.

Ignoring this in 2026 means repeating the mistake the West made with Korea's industry in the 2000s and Japan's mobile industry in the 2010s. Surprise is a posture the industry can no longer afford.