And Game Science are already making big bucks. According to a news report from the Zhejiang State Taxation Administration in China, the smash-hit action RPG had an overall estimated budget of "more than 300 million Yuan", per machine translation. That amounts to about $42.3 million by current conversions, which is quite a bit lower than the $70 million budget previously reported by Bloomberg.
Importantly, the scope of these figures isn't totally clear. This tax admin specifies total development cost, while Bloomberg reported on the contribution from Game Science's biggest external shareholder and how that compared to the game's budget. Staff salaries, office space, necessary hardware and software, support staff, marketing, distribution, and plenty of other factors and resources can affect a game's budget, to say nothing of eventual revenue splits with investors and partners. We simply do not have the specifics there.
The exact cost to make Wukong will likely remain unclear unless Game Science themselves share it, but this figure still helps corroborate a loose cost range, putting Wukong's production into perspective against their runaway success, and against the cost of some high-profile games made elsewhere.
Spotty court document redactions last year had inadvertently revealed development costs for PlayStation monoliths, "Horizon Forbidden West" and "The Last of Us Part 2" which both cost over $200 million to make – and which added fuel to ongoing discussions about the ballooning costs of AAA game development.
Currency economics aside, a huge factor here is average labor cost. Multiple resources and estimates suggest the mean and median game dev salaries in China are lower than in the United States, where The Last of Us studio Naughty Dog are based (in the high-cost-of-living state of California, at that), and in the Netherlands, home of Horizon developer Guerrilla Games.
The point is Game Science are claimed to have raked in upwards of $1.2 billion in raw revenue, which of course gets taxed and divided.
The numbers aren't the only impressive thing about Black Myth: Wukong's monumental success story, either as players spend a decent amount of time in-game, too. As of last month, fans were averaging a 27-hour playtime in Game Science's action RPG!
Malaysia's women's doubles pair Pearly Tan-Thinaah Muralitharan stormed into the Arctic Open semi-finals yesterday.
The world No. 7 comfortably defeated Taiwan's Chang Ching Hui-Yang Ching Tun 21-18, 21-8 in a quarter-final clash that lasted just 32 minutes.
They will face Japan's world No. 6 Rin Iwanaga-Kie Nakanishi in the semi-finals later today.
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