As Black Myth: Wukong becomes a global hit, images of a character resembling Nio's CEO have been widely circulated, giving Nio unexpected exposure.

Li himself seemed to have received a lot of images shared with him by his friends, stating in the comments section of one of his Weibo posts yesterday that he had received a lot of such images and urging 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 centers around an anthropomorphic monkey based on the Sun Wukong, or Monkey King, from the novel.

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

The game is one of China's rare successes in the field, with the number of concurrent players on Steam surpassing one million after just one hour of release.

Last night, Black Myth: Wukong reached a new high of about 2.36 million simultaneous players on Steam.

In addition to being well received by players, the game is also seen as an important platform for more overseas users to learn about Chinese culture. State-run media, including the People's Daily, have thus expressed high praise for it.

At yesterday's regular briefing by China's foreign ministry, a reporter mentioned the game, and spokeswoman Mao Ning made the following comment:

I do not know much about video games, but thank you for drawing my attention to this game. The name of this game suggests that it is inspired by the Chinese classic novel Journey to the West. I think this speaks to the appeal of the Chinese culture.

Some car companies have tried to capitalize on the popularity of Black Myth: Wukong to market their products, but with little success.

For example, Nio's local counterpart Li Auto (NASDAQ: LI) yesterday shared a video on Weibo of a blogger visiting some of the Black Myth: Wukong locations with a Li L7.

Both the blogger and Li Auto offered prizes to encourage Weibo users to repost the video, but the cumulative reposts totaled just over 3,000.

As of today, there are still several Weibo threads about Li and Elder Jinchi, many of which have been read in the millions.

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