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

As Black Myth: Wukong became a global hit, images of a character resembling NIO’s CEO were widely circulated, bringing unexpected attention to NIO.

One of the hottest topics in China this week was the global success of a locally made video game called Black Myth: Wukong.

The game’s huge success has attracted the interest of many businesses and local tourism authorities who want to use the game’s popularity to promote their own products and destinations.

Electric vehicle (EV) maker NIO (NYSE:NIO) didn’t intend to cash in on gaming’s popularity, but it ended up being a huge success.

On August 20, when Black Myth: Wukong was officially released to users, comments about an in-game character resembling NIO founder, chairman and CEO William Li began circulating widely.

An image then began circulating widely showing a character named Elder Kaneike next to Lee’s profile picture, and in-game dialogue was changed to refer to Nioh.

Also on August 20, NIO held its Power Up 2024 event and announced plans to build charging and battery swapping facilities.

At the time, Li had apparently not heard of the game as he was focused on NIO events and trying to attract more partners to work with the company to build EV infrastructure.

During a live video stream on the evening of August 20, Li was asked multiple times about the game and whether NIO’s vehicles support gameplay, during which he also asked his team members what the game is about and who the producer is.

As the popularity of Black Myth: Wukong continues to grow, images comparing Elder Jinchi to Li continue to be widely circulated, increasing exposure for the NIO brand.

Li himself appears to have received many of the images shared by his friends, saying in the comments section of his Weibo post yesterday that he had received many such images and urged 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 revolves around Sun Wukong, an anthropomorphic monkey modeled after the novel’s character, Sun Wukong.

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

The game has become one of China’s few success stories in its genre, reaching over 1 million concurrent players on Steam just one hour after its release.

Last night, Black Myth: Wukong hit a new record for concurrent players on Steam, with approximately 2.36 million.

The game has not only been well received by players, but is also seen as an important platform for more overseas users to learn about Chinese culture, and has been praised by state media such as the People’s Daily.

At a regular press conference held by the Chinese Foreign Ministry yesterday, a reporter mentioned the match, with spokesman Mao Ning commenting:

I don’t know much about video games, but thank you for letting me look at this game. From the name of this game, we can see that it was inspired by the Chinese classic novel “Journey to the West”, which I think speaks to the fascination with Chinese culture.

Several car companies have tried to capitalize on Black Myth: Wukong’s popularity to sell their products, but with little success.

For example, NIO’s local peer Li Auto (NASDAQ: LI) yesterday shared a video on Weibo of a blogger visiting several locations from Black Myth: Wukong in a Li L7.

Both the blogger and Li Auto offered prizes to encourage Weibo users to repost the video, which has garnered just over 3,000 reposts in total.

To this day, several Weibo threads about Li and the elder Jinchi remain, many of which have been read millions of times.

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