"Sudan's Game": Is Just Being Fun Enough?

Text by | Lan Jie

Edited by | Qiao Qian

"The Sultan's Game" has been the highlight of domestic single-player games since this year.

Since its launch, this role-playing card game created by a team of a dozen people has quickly broken through the circle and become an unavoidable topic in the gaming industry, thanks to its unique art style and solid and bold story content.

The success of "The Sultan's Game" is mainly reflected in two aspects. One is its commercial success - according to relevant data from VG Insights, the game's sales have currently reached $12.4 million (equivalent to 89.21 million RMB), with a total of 660,000 copies sold. In contrast, for independent games, achieving a sales volume of 20,000 is already a good result.

The other is its spread on content platforms - "The Sultan's Game" has become a traffic code on content platforms such as Xiaohongshu and Bilibili. A 36Kr author posted a note about the game through a personal Xiaohongshu account with only 70 followers, and within three days, it accumulated over 10,000 views and nearly 200 comments. Searching with the keyword "Sultan" has yielded nearly 100,000 notes on Xiaohongshu.

In addition, a large number of second-generation game videos, including plot interpretations and Cosplay transformations, have emerged on platforms such as Douyin and Xiaohongshu.

Excluding variables such as paid promotion, fun equals good sales

Why is "The Sultan's Game" selling well? A simple but core reason is that it is fun enough.

Qianshui, the editor-in-chief of TapTap, the game's promotional platform and distribution channel, said that TapTap's internal editorial team, which is responsible for scoring games, measures the quality of a game from aspects such as gameplay, mechanics, plot, and audio-visual performance, and then gives different scores and resources based on the quality itself. And "The Sultan's Game" was outstanding in all aspects from the beginning. "It was very popular during the trial play phase, and its completion rate was very high during the EA (Early Access) phase."

In addition, this game was not released on domestic game channels but chose to launch on Steam, one of the world's largest game platforms, with the buyout system as the main sales model. According to a relevant person in charge of 2P Games, the publisher of "The Sultan's Game", the game has hardly engaged in paid promotion. This means that there are actually not many variables affecting whether this game sells well, and whether it is fun is the core variable.

In detail, people mainly find this game fun in terms of its plot and art style.

In terms of the plot, "The Sultan's Game" has a large amount of text content, rich themes, and inclusiveness. In the game, whether players submit to the sultan's authority or choose to resist, there are enough plot rewards.

Therefore, some people praise the love and hope in this game, describing the significance of the wife, Meiji, to the protagonist as "an eternal light in the chaos and darkness"; others enjoy the chaos and evil in the game and are committed to unlocking various outrageous plots. This is not surprising. In the game, a group of players call themselves "chaotic evil" people, referring to players who take pleasure in doing evil in the game, and "The Sultan's Game" also gives these people enough room to play - in the words of the game's screenwriter, Zuanka, "The more difficult it is to unlock a plot, the more unrestrained we write it. Since it's so difficult to unlock, players must have given up a lot to see this plot." Thus, complex emotions and diverse choices have created the tension of this game.

In terms of art style, in this story set in a medieval fictional dynasty, the characters' costumes often have rich colors and borrow the visual language of Middle Eastern Islamic culture, such as mosaic parquet and Byzantine-style gold leaf backgrounds, with a mysterious religious meaning, making it stand out among current mainstream independent games with a Japanese and Korean card style or American realistic style.

In addition to its excellent quality, this game also catches some favorable timing and conditions.

An obvious background is that the proportion of Chinese game players among Steam users has been increasing. In March this year, Valve released the latest Steam Hardware and Software Survey Report for February. In February, the proportion of Steam users using Simplified Chinese exceeded 50% for the first time.

This is because on the other side of the domestic game industry entering the era of stock competition is the maturity of the game market, which means that more Chinese players who respect copyright, are willing to pay, and pursue higher quality and more diverse content will flock to the international and game-rich Steam.

Last year, "Black Myth: Wukong", which sold tens of millions of copies on Steam, also brought the platform further into the public eye. According to the download statistics provided by Steam, within less than four hours after the preload of "Black Myth: Wukong" was opened, the Steam download bandwidth soared and reached a maximum of 70 Tbps at its peak, breaking the record for the peak download bandwidth on the platform.

Moreover, as more and more domestic game giants choose to launch their games on Steam, the above trend has been further accelerated, including but not limited to "Seven Days World" and "Marvel Snap" under NetEase, "Delta Squad" under Tencent, and "Infinite Nuan Nuan" under Diezhi. These are all games that the above game manufacturers have invested heavily in and have an audience base.

Another background is that content platforms with hundreds of millions of daily active users, such as Xiaohongshu and Douyin, are making efforts in game content, especially the Xiaohongshu platform, which has been trying to enrich its existing audience profile in the past two years. Not long ago, Xiaohongshu also released the "Xiaohongshu Commercial Game Industry April Report", which showed that in April this year, the overall game traffic on the platform increased steadily compared with March, with the information flow traffic increasing by 34%. The top three categories were role-playing games, female-oriented games, and strategy games.

In addition, Xiaohongshu encourages platform users to post game-related content and provides certain traffic support. The platform has also recruited talents from traditional game live-streaming platforms such as Huya and Douyu to promote the construction of its own game content.

An unrepeatable success

A prominent and controversial label for "The Sultan's Game" is "independent game". So, does its commercial success mean that domestic independent games are getting better?

In 36Kr's communication with industry insiders, an obvious trend is that the number of independent game practitioners and works is increasing, and there are also no shortage of popular topics and works.

TapTap has been paying attention to independent games since its establishment, and has a dedicated team responsible for signing independent games. Qianshui, the editor-in-chief of TapTap, told 36Kr that in recent years, more excellent independent game works have been emerging, including "Daughter of the Volcano" and "BlazBlue: Chaos Effect".

In April this year, the person in charge of the first Beijing Independent Game Exhibition, Only, also told 36Kr that the effect of the exhibition far exceeded expectations. Not only were the exhibition tickets quickly sold out, but the number of attendees also exceeded a thousand.

To some extent, this is related to the industry winter that the game industry experienced in the past two years due to the suspension of game license issuance. Although game licenses have been resumed since 2024, those who were laid off due to corporate cost-cutting still find it difficult to find a good job in the current era of stock competition in the industry, and companies that did not survive the industry winter can no longer feel the recovery of the game industry.

Many of these practitioners and teams who have left the game industry have invested in the production of independent games, contributing to the current lively scene.

However, in contrast to this lively scene, the inability to make money remains the main theme of independent games.

"People thought they had escaped the hard labor in the red ocean and arrived in the promised land, but suddenly realized the biggest problem with PC games - users like fun games, not just cost-effective ones," said an independent game practitioner.

To elaborate, the Steam platform does provide a living space for independent games that cannot obtain game licenses, but practitioners who are used to focusing on game mechanisms that empty players' wallets often find it difficult to change their thinking about making games, thinking that price will be the main factor for players to choose to buy.

In addition, Qianshui said that the living environment for independent games has not improved significantly. Few independent games can get enough money to cover their development cycle. Moreover, independent games that want to be released and sold on domestic game platforms still have to spend a lot of effort to obtain game licenses. This is because large game companies and investors are becoming more cautious about investing money, and the commercial performance of independent games is often not as good as that of commercial games.

The creative team of "The Sultan's Game" also emphasized that this game is, to some extent, a last-ditch effort of a company on the verge of bankruptcy, resulting in over 1.4 million words of game text being produced within 14 months. At most, the creative staff member, Zuanka, once produced 17,000 words of finished copy per day. Zuanka said that even if the same team were to do it again, it would be difficult to achieve the same development effect under such a high-intensity working state.

To some extent, "The Sultan's Game" and "Black Myth: Wukong" have similar significance. They represent the peak works that are both well-received and commercially successful in their respective niche markets, but their emergence does not mean that the industry is about to boom.