In 2019, PC Gamer published the in-depth feature PC gaming in China: Everything you need to know about the world's biggest PC games industry. At the time, our goal in covering what our shared hobby looks like in a country that Western players still have little insight into.
"China's PC gaming industry is the largest in the world by a wide margin. The entire US games industry, including PC, mobile, and console games, generated only $30.4 billion in revenue in 2018—China's PC gaming scene alone is equal to about half of that," reporter Steven Messner wrote at the time. "In spite of those numbers, you might be hard-pressed to name a Chinese-made PC game."
One year later, Chinese developer Game Science announced Black Myth: Wukong, and everything changed.
"The past 10 years was a crazy, historic decade for the Chinese gaming industry," the founder of Chinese studio S-Game told me in Beijing last month. That may even be an understatement from Qiwei "Soulframe" Liang, who's directing Phantom Blade Zero, which I think has the potential to be the next action game to leave a Black Myth-sized impression on players. I've already talked and written about Phantom Blade Zero a lot, but it's not the only game picking up the torch from Black Myth and running with it.
In 2019, Chinese PC gaming was its own ecosystem that we wanted to help PC gamers outside China wrap their heads around, but most of biggest hits—League of Legends, PUBG—were imports, rather than games developed in China. And the relatively few hit games being developed in China were unlikely to be translated for other parts of the world.
In 2024, Black Myth: Wukong proved that big budget PC games developed in China could kill it on the world stage.
By 2030, we're going to be inundated by games of that same caliber.
What we're seeing now is a wave of games inspired and emboldened by Black Myth, as developers there take profits they made in mobile and start putting it towards what we more often think of as AAA games—like when Netflix started producing TV and films and gave Martin Scorsese $150 million dollars to make a 3-hour gangster drama. Chinese devs are hungry for that same prestige, and big publishers like Tencent and NetEase have the deep pockets needed to fund their blockbusters.
"All the focus is on making triple-A games. You can see a lot are coming," Liang said. "It's different. For Americans, it's not a new concept, because you guys are making huge games. GTA or something like that is quite familiar. Black Myth: Wukong has created this possibility for Chinese games, but I would say for most, the quality is still your basement, your foundation. Making the games better is very important.
"I think there's a pride for the gamers who played Black Myth, because they feel: We can make such a game. So we are very careful as Chinese developers to fulfill the requirements, the hype of the Chinese gamers. We have to make the games even better."
This is going to be a defining story of the next decade in PC gaming. So when I was invited by S-Game to fly to Beijing for an event focused on Phantom Blade Zero, I also saw it as a chance to really get a sense for where the Chinese industry is right now, and maybe peek over the horizon at where it's going.
The video above is the result: a detailed look at how the Chinese gaming industry has evolved since the 2010s, and the games like Delta Force, Wuchang, The Bustling World, Blood Message, Where Winds Meet, and more bringing about that new era.
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