(Photo: Visual China)
It's not that "Black Myth: Wukong" is perfect, but everyone here can't
In 2024, the TGA (The Game Awards), known as the Oscars of the video game industry, will usher in its 10th anniversary, and it will also usher in the most difficult choice since its establishment: whether to award the most important Game of the Year Award to "Black Myth: Wukong" from China.
As the developer of Game Science, and the first triple-A major production in China, Black Myth: Wukong, which has been on sale for less than half a year, has created a spectacle in the history of video games. After its release on August 20, 2024, Black Myth: Wukong sold more than 10 million copies in 3 days, breaking the all-time record. As of now, it has sold nearly 30 million copies in less than four months.
Compared to all similar masterpieces in history, "Black Myth: Wukong" is a work with outstanding advantages and disadvantages, but for China, the "first college student in the village" is extraordinary. In the months following its release, Black Myth: Wukong dominated online public opinion, and any topic that touches it may attract people's keen attention. The filming location of the game has become a popular tourist destination, the game's soundtrack concert is full of concerts on tour across the country, and the related concept stocks in the securities market are soaring......
It can be said that "Black Myth: Wukong" single-handedly raised the status of video games in China directly to the temple.
Of course, the complex that Chinese have around "Black Myth: Wukong" may be difficult to understand for a game award like TGA, which was founded by foreigners and basically selected by foreigners. However, even in terms of the game itself, in 2024, a small year for games with low production capacity in the industry, it is indeed very limited that the world can compete with "Black Myth: Wukong" for the best game of the year.
With the exception of Black Myth: Wukong, the five games nominated have their own origins and characteristics, but in terms of TGA's awards criteria for the past decade, they all seem to be a breath of a breath away, or a lot of breath, from the best of the year.
2024 TGA Best Game of the Year Nominees (Photo: TGA official website)
"Astro Bot" is a young man, as the son of Sony's own development and distribution, and even the operation has been specially designed for Sony's game console Playstation5 (PS5), but in terms of volume and quality, it is a family-friendly sketch game after all, and it is difficult to meet the TGA's general requirements for the best of the year - the previous winners of the best of the year are almost all high-cost productions, and they must be in technology, A work that has reached a considerable level of gameplay or cultural influence.
The Cosmic Robot's takeaway at the 2024 TGA is destined to be one of the most controversial outcomes in TGA history. It received 7 nominations, 3 awards, and was voted Game of the Year.
In addition, as a single-player game, it even won the best family game.
Balatro is undoubtedly an outlier in the 2024 TGA Best of the Year nominations, a delicate card-based mini-production that has garnered critical acclaim and good sales, and has attracted hundreds of hours of gameplay. However, like "Cosmic Robot", it has the problem of small volume and volume, and a nomination alone may already be the biggest affirmation of it. Moreover, in addition to the best of the year, it also won four other nominations such as Best Direction and Best Indie Game, and won three awards for Best Debut Indie Game, Best Indie Game and Best Mobile Game, which can be said to be a bumper harvest.
Square Enix remade the 1997 classic role-playing game Final Fantasy 7 as Final Fantasy 7, and then split an originally complete story into three chapters to sell, and the 2024 TGA Best of the Year nomination is the second of them...... Chapter 1 was also nominated for the 2023 TGA. Want to see the finale of the third part? Sorry, at least until 2025.
It is understandable that a film and television community like Station P gives the best of the year to "Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth", and if TGA does this, it will really smash its own signboard and give it the best music, which is already very embarrassing.
The so-called remake more than 20 years later is actually a brand new game based on the story and setting of the old generation of Final Fantasy 7, and compared to many old game remakes, Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth can be described as full of sincerity. Although the game is crammed with all kinds of crumbling obsessive-compulsive mini-games in order to make up for time, in terms of all aspects of the game's performance, Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth has no breakthroughs or shortcomings, and it is a work that meets the expectations of today's era. In addition to being unoriginal, its biggest problem is mediocrity, and the chicken thief in business strategy has directly caused the sales of the trilogy to plummet before the second part is sold - and sales are also an important indicator to measure the best of the year.
The most controversial TGA Best of the Year nomination in 2024 is undoubtedly "Elden Ring: Shadow of the Golden Tree". The controversy lies in the fact that this is not a game, but a part of the game's supplemental content, which is DLC (Downloadable Content).
It's not uncommon for game makers today to charge a little more box office by selling DLC, but adding a shorter amount of content to a game is obviously not as meaningful as making a game from scratch. Even if "Elden Ring" is a classic of a generation and is itself the winner of the 2022 TGA of the Year, it is indeed difficult to convince the public to use DLC to impact the best of the year.
Previously, the TGA's official response to the controversy was very special, and in November 2024, they specially released a new rule for the annual awards: DLC is allowed to participate.
The DLC has not been selected by the TGA before, and the Witcher 3: Wild Hunt DLC "Blood and Wine" also won the 2016 TGA Award for Best RPG. In fact, there has never been a rule in the history of the TGA that DLC cannot participate in the annual awards, but at the cusp of this controversy, such a new rule tailored for "Elden Ring: Shadow of the Golden Tree" is undoubtedly further exacerbating the conflict.
As the most talked-about bellwether in the game industry, it is not a healthy direction for the industry for the TGA to choose a DLC rather than an original new game, or even just let the DLC occupy a nomination spot.
Black Myth: Wukong
Metaphor: Refantazio, the latest game from veteran Japanese role-playing game giant Atlus, has won multiple nominations, as well as Best RPG and Best Narrative.
Although it has limited popularity in China, it may be the most qualified opponent on this nomination list to compare with Black Myth: Wukong in terms of hard metrics - first of all, it is a game with sufficient volume, high quality, and complete originality; And much like Black Myth: Wukong, it's also a local title with just as obvious pros and cons: it successfully blends JRPG story mode, anime art style, and new-gen technical presentation, all while having a bunch of rough and annoying details.
If you really want to say that "Metaphor Fantasy" is weaker than "Black Myth: Wukong", excluding the subjective factors of gameplay style, "Metaphor Fantasy", which was released late and has a relatively niche category, will definitely not be able to compete with "Black Myth: Wukong" in terms of sales. In addition, the peripheral effects that can be driven by the two are not at the same level.
So looking at it this way, Black Myth: Wukong should have a big chance of winning the best of the year, and it is an exaggeration to say that even if you compare the games that have won the TGA of the Year in the past ten years (Overwatch), Black Myth: Wukong has no chance of winning. It's just that in the 2024 nomination list, it is really the most deserving one.
Although it seems to be a new face on the international stage of the TGA, at such an annual meeting of the game power club, which is indispensable for the exchange of interests, "Black Myth: Wukong" is not without a backstage, and there are at least three major TGA customers standing behind it: Sony, Tencent, and Villefort (Valve). They all have very good reasons to push "Black Myth: Wukong" again.
TGA Advisory Steering Group (Photo: TGA official website)
Sony just announced its second-quarter earnings report in November, with sales revenue from its gaming and network services business increasing by 12% year-on-year, and operating profit reaching about RMB6.5 billion, up 184% year-on-year, setting a new high for the division in the second quarter. Sony explained that the increase in operating profit of the game business mainly came from the contribution of two new game IPs, one is a "new sports game" and the other is an "action role-playing game from China". And we can also see that the release of "Black Myth: Wukong" has greatly stimulated the sales of Sony's game console PS5, and domestic offline and online channels have been sold out of stock many times.
For Sony, it was a lifesaver. In 2024, Sony's heavily invested shooter Concord became a phenomenal failure, with the game having less than 1,000 players at its peak at the same time, and was refunded and removed from the shelves less than a month after its release, costing more than $300 million — a deficit that can be made up by the revenue generated by Black Myth: Wukong.
Villefort owns Steam, the world's largest online game sales platform, which is also the main sales channel for Black Myth: Wukong. At present, according to incomplete statistics, the sales of "Black Myth: Wukong" on the Steam platform have exceeded 23 million copies, with sales exceeding 1.01 billion US dollars (about 7.31 billion yuan). According to Steam's sales sharing rules, the sale of this game alone has brought more than 200 million US dollars (about 1.45 billion yuan) in revenue to Villefort.
Not to mention Tencent, which has a direct and indirect stake in Game Science, the developer of Black Myth: Wukong.
However, there are also many factors that prevent Black Myth: Wukong from being selected as the best of the year.
TGA, a contradiction
The hostility of public opinion brought about by changes in the geopolitical environment has inevitably spilled over into the gaming sector. From the end of 2023, the European and American game media circles have begun to show a not very friendly attitude towards the increasingly out-of-the-circle "Black Myth: Wukong".
First, at the end of 2023, Game Science released a promotional video for "Black Myth: Wukong", and then IGN France commented, "Isn't it a bit dangerous to put your magic growth stick in your ears?" This is not a cotton swab. Many players criticized IGN France for ignorance and lack of respect for the background culture of the game's story. IGN France then apologized, but in a rather apopathic manner, saying that it would not cover the game again and justifying itself: "We sincerely believe that the golden hoop stick should be behind the ear, not in the ear. ”
Then, on the eve of the release of "Black Myth: Wukong" in the summer of 2024, a considerable number of overseas game media and online self-media bloggers began to accuse the developer of game science, claiming that they were very uncooperative in some interviews and publicity processes, such as questioning that there were too many men in the team, or that there was gender objectification in the game content. The game science team refused to answer these accusations. The media and self-media of these game institutions that have touched the nail are obviously very dissatisfied, and the ratings given after the release of the game are generally low, and a considerable number of them will participate in the TGA selection.
Off-site factors that have nothing to do with games or even business seem to have an increasingly serious impact on the results of the TGA, and due to political correctness factors in Europe and the United States, there will be one of the major game works that have been excluded from the circle by the TGA in 2023.
In 2023, the game adaptation of the Harry Potter novel series "Hogwarts Legacy" was released, and with the blessing of good quality and a large Harry Potter fan base, it became one of the best-selling games of the year, but it did not even receive a single nomination at the TGA that year, which was quite unusual.
Many players said that this is similar to that of Harry Potter novel author J· K. Rowling's repeated remarks on transgender issues have a lot to do with offending political correctness in Europe and the United States. As a result, Rowling herself broke with the entire Harry Potter film crew, and some Harry Potter fan groups did not even recognize Rowling's relationship with the Harry Potter series. Warner Bros. Games, the publisher of "Hogwarts Legacy", who felt this emotion and was afraid of being involved in it and affecting the reviews and sales, made a special statement that Rowling was not directly involved in the production of the game.
Clearly, the TGA is also infected with this chilling silence about political correctness. Therefore, in the face of the game science of "Black Myth: Wukong", such a new force that has stepped onto the world stage for the first time, is unfamiliar and has an international saliva lawsuit, but its sales and strength are very strong, TGA's entanglement is inevitable.
"Black Myth: Wukong" won the 2024 TGA Best Action Game Award, and Jiang Baimura, Chief Game Planner of Game Science, took the stage to accept the award (Photo: TGA official website)
Even though Black Myth: Wukong won four other nominations, including Best Art Direction, Best Action Game, and Best Action Game in addition to Game of the Year, and won Best Action Game and Player's Choice, it is clear that most of the eyes will still be on the most important award. In this sense, Game of the Year has long been not a professional evaluation, but an expression of attitude.
According to the TGA's official statement, their nominations will be selected by more than 50 experts from within the gaming industry, and then the final winner will be voted for - 90% of the voting will be weighted by game media and 10% by the general public.
As a game award, TGA seems to be trying to convey a kind of professionalism and objectivity, deliberately keeping a certain distance from the taste of the masses. At the same time, it is also a media program that needs to rely on communication to obtain advertising and sponsorship, and it is inevitably inseparable from the masses.
In fact, it is difficult to achieve the professional objectivity emphasized by the TGA, and its gorgeous advisory group and selection expert group are almost all from enterprises in highly related industries such as production, distribution, chips, consoles, etc., and the voting weight accounts for the absolute majority, and the English media is the absolute dominant media voting group, among which such as IGN, Gamespot, and other European and American game media giants, and behind them are a number of advertising parties: such as Ubisoft (Ubisoft), R Star (Rockstar Games), Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Square Enix and other major game companies.
So TGA has become a collection of various contradictions, to be professional and objective, but also to take care of public opinion and political correctness, but also to meet the needs of Party A's father, but also to attract audience popularity - this kind of balancing is difficult, but you also have to admit that TGA is the relatively less ugly balancing in the game award show.
On such a stage, the sales growth brought by the award nomination is secondary, directly entering a game vertical, entering the field of vision of manufacturers, media, and players, and gaining their attention and even respect, which is not only an appreciation and commemoration of a game of the year, but also an opening up for the future of game practitioners. After all, no matter how powerful a game manufacturer is, it can't avoid communicating and collaborating with other players in the industry.
There are exceptions, such as Game Science, where the TGA awards are more of a icing on the cake in terms of the strength and background they have already shown.
"Please wrap up"
Geoff Keighley, the founder and host of the TGA stage, can be said to be the chosen son of a gaming media person.
Born in 1978, Gisley came from a wealthy family and was able to play the latest games and cutting-edge consoles from an early age. His parents were veteran film and television professionals, and members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — the Academy from which the Oscars are presented — and regular attendees of the Academy Awards. Guisley, who has loved games since childhood, naturally had an idea under this influence: why don't video games have this kind of treatment? What is the Oscar for the game?
When Gisley was 16 years old, a TV game awards show was about to air, and the producers needed someone to write an introduction to the games on the show, but none of the copywriters knew about the games. Gisley's father referred him straight to him. In the era when the social recognition of games was not high, in order to attract audiences, the show found a bunch of artists who had nothing to do with games to participate in the show - this is also a common problem of game award shows for a long time: the positioning is vague and nondescript.
But for Gisley, he embarked on the path of a game media person.
At the age of 18, he founded a game information website called "Gameslice". At that time, other game information websites would only integrate public information and do some simple evaluation, but from the perspective of a deep enthusiast, he went deep into the team behind the game in the form of an investigative reporter, recording various details of the game's development and commercial operation.
When he was in his teens and twenties, most of the game manufacturers were the objects of serious attention that the mainstream media disdained to pay attention to, and Gisley, a curious little ghost who seemed serious and professional compared to them, won the favor of many game practitioners, as well as the coveted interview resources of game media people later. He used to talk on the phone for hours with executives on Red Alert's development team, documenting the game programmer's all-nighter stay up and not even bother to shave; He oversaw the development of the Unreal engine by Epic Games, a major game player. Villefort's founder, Gabe Newell, known as "G Fat," would stuff the company's access card directly to Gisley, allowing him to wander around the company and talk to people casually. Later star producer Hideo Kojima also became his friend......
The success of the TGA had a lot to do with the network of resources that Giighley had established in his early years.
After 2003, he switched from text media to television media, and began to produce game shows for SpikeTV channel in the United States, and became the host of the channel's annual game awards show VGA (Spike Video Game Awards). Before the advent of TGA, VGA was once the most well-known game award in the United States and even the world.
TGA Founder and Host Jeff Ghisley (Photo: TGA Official Website)
While his VGA experience has given Gisley a lot of skills in the production process of TV shows, his conflict with Spike TV has become increasingly acute. As a commercial TV station, Spike TV's requirements for programs are obviously far from the requirements of game lovers. For the sake of ratings, the executives of TV stations who don't know anything about games and are not interested in them often like to engage in some very cheap operations: such as stuffing some second- and third-tier artists who don't play games at all and don't know what to say to the VGA awards ceremony; a group of scantily clad female models carrying award-winning game producers; Or invite some talk show actors to come on stage to participate in the hosting, telling some jokes that are very inappropriate and even hurt the player group.
This contradiction erupted in 2013 at the VGA (renamed VGX that year). Spike TV first posted advertisements all over the venue, and product placements such as Doritos potato chips appeared repeatedly. A talk show actor who co-hosted the show told a bunch of garbage jokes and joked that the player group was a group of fat houses living in the basement of their parents' house, which completely offended the core audience.
Gisley and Spike TV broke up. Spike TV, which thought that the game awards ceremony was cheap and troublesome, simply gave up the game award ceremony. Gisley, who left Spike TV, decided to hold an awards show that would be in his own hands and built specifically for the gaming community.
The rest of the story looks inspiring. In 2014, Gisley paid $1 million out of his own pocket and used all the resources of the industry since his career to create the TGA, which became known as the Oscars of the gaming industry. TGA, which was watched by only 1.9 million people that year, has become the most well-known game awards show in the world by 2023, with the number of viewers reaching 118 million.
This also means that no matter what you do in the future, the TGA will be the target of public criticism. The history of the game awards is almost the same as that of all cultural product awards, which is a process of centralization and then continuous decentralization, and the new forces that rise after decentralization often become a new center. Just like the emergence of IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes that broke the monopoly of professional media people and industry associations on the evaluation rights of film and television works, the new forces that have a certain evaluation right are inevitably targeted by different interest groups related to the film and television industry and are coerced into a new cycle.
The TGA created by professional game media person Gisley has been qualitatively improved compared with all previous game award ceremonies. All aspects of the show, from performances to guests, even commercial advertisements or trailers, are at least highly related to the game elements, and this occasion has truly become a global carnival for the gaming community.
Gisley does focus on some of the overlooked. For example, in 2024, the TGA awarded the Industry Changer of the Year award to Amir Satvat, who has done something of great social value in his spare time as the director of business development for Tencent Games North America: creating a community called "Games Jobs Workbook" to provide employment opportunities and mentorship for unemployed game workers.
But the situation is stronger than people, in addition to the game of various on-field and off-field factors, many things that Gisley himself couldn't look down on before, after he was in charge of firewood, rice, oil and salt, he had to start doing it for various reasons.
For example, there are awards that are almost tantamount to fraud, such as the "China Fan Choice Award" in 2016, which was specially designed to make Chinese game fans happy. This award only survived once in the midst of a lot of scolding.
All game manufacturers with a little resources have begun to try to grab a place to announce the trailer in the TGA, which is a place where the world has attracted attention and the audience is particularly concentrated. So about half of the whole ceremony, the audience will be watching various trailers.
Another example is inviting an entertainer to be a guest. One of the things that TGA is relatively progressive about is that most of the celebrity guests they invite are still related to games, or are really interested in games. But these people, who are significantly more famous than the game developers behind the scenes, also often dominate the crowd.
What makes many game practitioners and enthusiasts dissatisfied is that the TGA, which claims to pay tribute to game developers, even has to be stuck in people's speaking time, while celebrities can say it casually.
In the 2023 TGA, Baldur's Gate 3 won several awards such as Game of the Year, and Swen Vincke, the founder and CEO of the production team Larian Studios, wore a set of armor of the same style as the game, and took the stage to accept the honor with several members of the game's core development team. The production team was thrilled to give a new lease of life after many years of the game's most prestigious role-playing game franchise, and they took the opportunity to pay tribute to the late developer in their testimonials.
Just 30 seconds into their speeches, they saw the TGA staff in the audience type a sentence to them with a teleprompter: "Please Wrap it up." Anyway, at least the word "please" was used.
Sven Wenk ended his speech in a bit of a panic after seeing the prompt, and he wanted to announce some new game-related information on stage, but he had to post it on social media afterwards. And this situation happened many times on the same day, once the winner spoke out of time, he would be prompted, and if the prompt was useless, he would directly play music to drive people. Someone commented on social media: "At the game awards, the filmmaker can speak for 5 minutes, but the gamer can only speak for 30 seconds." ”
It is said that the TGA did this because of the lessons learned, and one of the winners in 2022 gave a nearly 7-minute speech on stage, which has little to do with the game, which is really long-winded. But the TGA in 2023 has obviously used too much force to solve this problem.
In contrast, Hideo Kojima, a star producer and Ghisley's longtime friend who has not released any game titles, could talk about a new partnership with Xbox on stage for nearly 10 minutes.
The crew of "Fallout" participated in the 2023 TGA Awards ceremony. In 2023, TGA will reach 118 million viewers, making it the most famous game awards show in the world (Photo: TGA official website)
Gisley later admitted that there was a problem in this regard, saying that the music at the awards ceremony was played too early and that the problem would be resolved in the future. This year, at least, the problem has improved relatively well. They basically didn't rush people, and most of the winners were very conscious of their time. Sven Wenk, who didn't have a chance to finish his sentence last year, was invited to give the award for the best game, and he was happy.
The TGA has stumbled all the way up and ushered in its 10th anniversary. Even if there are problems of one kind or another, it is not easy to find a platform that can replace TGA. The Oscars in the game industry are really like the Oscars in the film industry, which has become an existence that can not explain anything, but practitioners and audiences cannot help but pay attention to it.
On the occasion of the 10th anniversary, Gisley and TGA seem to be ready to climb another mountain: in November 2024, TGA registered accounts on several Chinese online platforms with a high concentration of players, such as Bilibili, Xiaohongshu and Weibo, and began to publish a series of promotional content.
This is undoubtedly the best opportunity for TGA to further open up the situation in China, and it is also the most sensitive opportunity. Is it to offend the Chinese player community of the new blue ocean, or to offend the European and American game media circles of the basic market? The TGA, which had a hard time striking a proper balance, finally came up with its own choice: to directly lower the bar for Game of the Year and offend everyone.
Southern People Weekly reporter Li Tuimao
Editor-in-charge: Chen Yafeng