Black Myth: Wukong sends China’s game-enabled hotels into overdrive, boosts room rates
Stay-and-play rooms with high-powered PCs prove popular among fans who lack their own hardware or just want a nice place to play with friends
Some operators of such hotels – which offer gaming hardware in their rooms for fans who do not necessarily have their own – reported that they sold out multi-person rooms on August 20, the evening that the game was released.
Booking site operator Trip.com Group confirmed the spike in activity, reporting that search volume for gaming rooms that night increased by 40 per cent compared with the previous day. Nearly 70 per cent of the gaming fans booking such hotels were from the post-90s and post-00s generations, and 75 per cent were men, the company said.
The success of China’s first AAA premium game, which is based on the literary figure Monkey King from the 16th-century Chinese novel Journey to the West, is also driving a travel boom in parts of the country, according to local authorities and businesses.