Game Science has officially made a name for itself with its latest release: "Black Myth: Wukong." But now that the company is in the spotlight, people are noticing some major flaws.
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00:00GameScience has officially made a name for itself with its latest release,
00:03Black Myth Wukong. But now that the company is in the spotlight,
00:07people are noticing some major flaws.
00:09Where disparities persist, bloodbaths may arise."
00:14Suffice to say, Black Myth Wukong is blowing everyone away,
00:17with millions of players around the world checking out the newest Souls-like on the block.
00:22Within 24 hours of its debut, Black Myth hit over 2.3 million concurrent players on Steam alone.
00:30He's not just any monkey. He's a monkey of merit."
00:35The game shot past the high-water mark set by Palworld earlier this year,
00:39and that's even more impressive considering it's a $60 single-player title.
00:44Basically, everyone agrees that Black Myth is great, but behind GameScience's development chops,
00:48there are signs that the studio may be dominated by a toxic work culture.
00:53Some of GameScience's founders and employees have a history of making sexist comments online,
00:58a tendency that dates back to years before Black Myth began development.
01:02Back in November 2023, IGN published an investigation into sexist comments made
01:06by the team at GameScience, including some of the studio's founders. Now that Black Myth
01:12is on everyone's radar, more people are going back to that report, and they're
01:15shocked by what IGN discovered. For example, GameScience lead artist and co-founder Yang
01:21Chi wrote a post on Weibo back in 2013 in which he argued about the biological
01:26differences in male and female gamers. He wrote that men tend to be more interested
01:30in violent video games with complex mechanics, and women like simple games with cute pets and
01:35collectibles. It should go without saying that biology and gender don't really determine gaming
01:40preferences, but Yang took his argument even further by urging developers to ignore game
01:44design elements that he viewed as appealing to women. He wrote,
01:48"...you don't need the reverse motivation of female players. You don't need to take
01:52care of those worms who just want to date chicks. Some things are just for men."
01:56The post concludes with this sentiment,
01:58"...if I really like soft and effeminate things, I just need to make something
02:02different and wear stockings and suspenders to work every day. This is what I call professionalism."
02:07"...that boy ain't right."
02:09It's not just that Yang and some of his fellow co-founders espouse sexist views online. The
02:14arguably even bigger problem is that those views seem to have become part of GameScience's internal
02:19culture. The company has previously used recruitment ads that featured sexual imagery
02:24and made jokes about having sexual relations with their co-workers. More recently, one of the
02:29technical artists who worked on Black Myth also wrote comments online about fetishizing characters
02:34from the game. And that's not all. More recently, the marketing team behind Black Myth sent out a
02:39bizarre email to content creators who got early access to the game, giving them an interesting
02:43list of topics they shouldn't discuss while playing. According to IGN's sources, that list
02:48included some fairly standard items, like not using offensive language and not insulting other
02:53creators. It also included some more concerning items, including the following.
02:57Do not use trigger words such as quarantine or isolation or COVID-19.
03:02Do not discuss content related to China's game industry policies — opinions,
03:06news, etc. Do not include politics, violence, nudity, feminist propaganda,
03:11fetishization, and other content that instigates negative discourse.
03:15In light of GameScience's history, instructing streamers not to talk about feminist propaganda
03:20has made some fear that the company has no intention of changing its culture.
03:24When PC Gamer asked a member of the company about IGN's report,
03:27they said,
03:28"'We have no comment. We're sorry.'"