Nio emerges as surprise winner as Chinese video game ‘Black Myth: Wukong’ becomes global hit

As Black Myth: Wukong becomes a global hit, images of a character resembling Nio‘s CEO have been widely circulated, giving Nio unexpected exposure.

One of the most discussed topics in China this week was the global success of Black Myth: Wukong, a video game created by a local team.

The game’s huge success has attracted many companies and local government tourism authorities who want to capitalize on the game’s fame to market their products or tourist destinations.

Electric vehicle (EV) maker Nio (NYSE: NIO) didn’t have any intention of capitalizing on the game’s popularity, but it turned out to be a big winner.

On August 20, the day Black Myth: Wukong officially opened to users, a comment about a character in the game who looked similar to Nio founder, chairman and CEO William Li began to circulate widely.

Subsequently, images placing the character, Elder Jinchi, alongside Li’s profile photo began to circulate widely, and a line from the game was changed to relate to Nio.

Also August 20, Nio held a Power Up 2024 event to unveil plans to build charging and battery swap facilities.

Li was focused on the Nio event at the time, trying to attract more partners to build EV infrastructure with the company, and never seemed to have heard of the game.

During a live video stream on the evening of August 20, Li was asked several times about the game and whether Nio’s vehicles supported playing it. At that time, he also asked team members what the game was and who the producers were.

As Black Myth: Wukong continues to gain traction, images analogizing Elder Jinchi to Li continue to go viral widely and give the Nio brand more exposure.

Li himself seemed to have received a lot of images shared with him by his friends, stating in the comments section of one of his Weibo posts yesterday that he had received a lot of such images and urging people to support the masterpieces created by local teams in various fields.

Black Myth: Wukong is an action role-playing game developed and published by Chinese team Game Science.

The game is inspired by the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West and centers around an anthropomorphic monkey based on the Sun Wukong, or Monkey King, from the novel.

Elder Jinchi is the hidden boss in Black Myth: Wukong, and players must complete a secret mission to get there.

The game is one of China’s rare successes in the field, with the number of concurrent players on Steam surpassing one million after just one hour of release.

Last night, Black Myth: Wukong reached a new high of about 2.36 million simultaneous players on Steam.

In addition to being well received by players, the game is also seen as an important platform for more overseas users to learn about Chinese culture. State-run media, including the People’s Daily, have thus expressed high praise for it.

At yesterday’s regular briefing by China’s foreign ministry, a reporter mentioned the game, and spokeswoman Mao Ning made the following comment:

I do not know much about video games, but thank you for drawing my attention to this game. The name of this game suggests that it is inspired by the Chinese classic novel Journey to the West. I think this speaks to the appeal of the Chinese culture.

Some car companies have tried to capitalize on the popularity of Black Myth: Wukong to market their products, but with little success.

For example, Nio’s local counterpart Li Auto (NASDAQ: LI) yesterday shared a video on Weibo of a blogger visiting some of the Black Myth: Wukong locations with a Li L7.

Both the blogger and Li Auto offered prizes to encourage Weibo users to repost the video, but the cumulative reposts totaled just over 3,000.

As of today, there are still several Weibo threads about Li and Elder Jinchi, many of which have been read in the millions.

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