Kuro Games' Li Songlun: The Man Himself

Author / Soda

This article is republished with permission from “Kao Pu Er Ci Yuan” (Reliable ACG).

In August 2025, Kuro Games held its first-ever festival.

Near the end, players still on stage spontaneously shouted, “Songlun, Songlun.”

He was called up, stood there a little embarrassed for a moment, thanked the players, talked about how Kuro Fes came to be, and then offered an eight-character blessing:

“Let’s all cross the high mountains and witness something better.”

Later, someone captured a photo of him standing offstage, staring blankly at the crowd, his solemn expression tinged with relief, as if thinking about something far away.

In 2013, Li Songlun graduated from university and joined a small company called Lezhi Game as a UI designer. A year later, together with his senior colleague Liu Sheng, they founded Kuro, where he served as both lead UI designer and lead planner for their first product, Battle of the Twin Tails.

Many people don’t know that when Kuro was first established, the team had only nine people.

Nine people making an anime game — in that era when entrepreneurship was booming, it wasn’t a pipe dream. He and the team believed anime games had huge potential and it was a field they were “genuinely passionate about.”

A tiny team, no money, no fame, based in Guangdong, choosing a niche track that almost no one in the country was exploring with original IP. Yet the whole team was incredibly excited; when you have passion, ideas and direction constantly emerge.

In 2016, distributed by Chenzhike (Morning Tech), Kuro’s first anime game Battle of the Twin Tails launched. According to later disclosures from Chenzhike-related parties, as of May 31, 2017, the game’s total revenue exceeded 187 million RMB. But like most startup companies’ first products, that revenue was just a number; its real meaning often lies in what it inspires for the next work.

In an era when the anime game market was absolutely dominated by Onmyoji and Fate/Grand Order, Battle of the Twin Tails looked to players like a small-scale test project. But reviews like “too fair to players to make money,” “grinding can change your fate,” and “a story that only true anime fans can understand” — all somewhat ahead of their time — made Kuro, still just a small development team, highly anticipated by players.

But back then, the norm was that ordinary anime games had short lives. After two and a half years of operation, Battle of the Twin Tails shut down at the end of 2018. Li Songlun later recalled this product, saying the team didn’t understand player experience well enough, wasn’t prepared for future versions, and had no plan for long-term operation and updates, leading to most problems being handled frantically after launch.

Having learned from that experience, Li Songlun led the same team to tackle something harder: transitioning to 3D, using Unity. In 2019, Punishing: Gray Raven launched. As the product spec improved, technical problems grew even bigger. On launch day, Punishing: Gray Raven suffered the “Black Card Incident” — the dev team mistakenly sent premium currency “Black Cards” to some accounts, and after a rollback, many players ended up with negative balances. Li Songlun immediately went live that night. Facing a barrage of bullet comments saying “you don’t treat players like people,” he said: “I’m doing this livestream precisely because I treat you like people.”

At the time, many players didn’t think much of that line. But as the game iterated quickly, players later realized that not every company would go live to explain and apologize after an operational incident. As the company founder, daring to take the heat on a livestream after a mishap — Li Songlun truly deserves the title “gutsy boss.”

What happened next, everyone knows. Punishing: Gray Raven was a success. After its China iOS launch, it hit #3 on the top-grossing chart, with first-month revenue of 270 million RMB, and it’s still going strong in its seventh year.

In 2020, just as Punishing: Gray Raven had found its footing, Li Songlun made a decision: to build an open world.

When he thought about open worlds, three works came to mind that had left a deep impression on him: the game Death Stranding, the movie Annihilation, and the Chinese animation The Legend of Hei.

In an interview, he said these works left a strong impression on him — the supernatural phenomena and superpowered characters would fit perfectly in an open-world game.

These works all share an underlying theme of “uniting existing society to save humanity,” which later became the narrative foundation of Kuro’s first open-world game, Wuthering Waves.

Also, Li Songlun loves music. In his view, sound itself is a very interesting medium for conveying ideas. So a concept for a new game emerged: using sound as the core setting to tell an ultra-long story.

Based on this idea, they kept refining it until “Lament,” driven by frequencies, became the foundation of Wuthering Waves. Whenever the Lament sounds, crises and disasters befall the land, but some people gain the superpower of “Resonance” and use that power to influence the world.

An open world is not easy to make. The products available for reference in the market were extremely few — or rather, every developer at that time was stockpiling anime games hoping to become the next Genshin Impact.

By then, Li Songlun no longer saw anime games as just “vase” products relying on pretty art. He had practical experience in innovating both gameplay and design. But to build an un-copyable moat, it had to be technical. Choosing an open world was also because, when others dared not try, he felt it was worth a gamble.

Genshin Impact grew bigger and bigger; every anime game developer dreamed of an open world. Kuro was among the first, but as work progressed, Li Songlun realized he had still underestimated the difficulty.

In his 2022 TDW speech, Li Songlun listed four major difficulties on the screen: the whirlpool of “industrialization,” filling core talent gaps, long content validation cycles, and too many detail issues. Talking about industrialization, he said Kuro was still a “rookie team” that had to build its own industrialization processes gradually through daring ideas, daring actions, and daring attempts.

This lesson proved true for many subsequent open-world projects — in fact, every open-world product’s industrialization path is uniquely adapted and cannot be replicated. At that time, hand-crafting an open-world industrialization workflow was extremely valuable.

Through trials and errors, time came to 2022. Punishing: Gray Raven was no longer leading in all aspects. The entire game industry knew there was plenty of market dividends to harvest, and that anime games could make money was no longer a secret. Many big-company employees and anime game producers started their own ventures, secured funding, and released trailers and roadmaps.

Many anime games became players’ favorites during these years, but Wuthering Waves stayed true to Songlun’s “slow” approach. The only thing players could see was one test version per year. Everyone who played it applauded, raising expectations even higher for those who hadn’t. Everyone thought the game that could pressure Genshin Impact at that time could only be Wuthering Waves.

Just then, the trend of making the protagonist overpowered (a “surpassing everyone” type) quietly emerged — players wanted a good life in the virtual world. Against this backdrop, the second beta of Wuthering Waves bombed. The protagonist started with classic amnesia, but was held at gunpoint by a key character, constantly doubted throughout, sparking player dissatisfaction.

Bugs could be fixed, but if the starting story was bad, the game would certainly be doomed. For the third beta, Wuthering Waves decisively rewrote the story and listened more to player feedback, adding a “skip” function. The story changes from third beta to launch didn’t satisfy everyone, but the “skip” button became a standard feature for later anime games.

In May 2024, Wuthering Waves launched globally. In its first week, it made nearly 500 million RMB and topped the iOS best-seller charts in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Singapore, and other markets. This was the best result in Kuro’s history.

As in the past, the success was followed by “adverse winds.” Negative player sentiment erupted across the board. Compared to the Black Card and server crash issues in the Punishing: Gray Raven era, Wuthering Waves faced problems with long-tail negative effects that made it hard for new players to start: for example, technical issues from switching from Unity to UE4 led to poor engine optimization, making the mobile version basically unplayable and causing lag and crashes on PC; the poster girl Yangyang’s line “The rear personnel have many things to consider” became a classic Wuthering Waves meme; the first limited banner was set as the male character Jiyan, who also got the label “General who fled”…

When you overreach, you get burned.

The experience from Punishing: Gray Raven was applied to Wuthering Waves: first admit mistakes, then fix bugs, finally make up with good content. On the second day after launch, they gave out a limited ten-pull + a free 5-star; in the second week, they issued an apology notice and a ton of compensation resources; in the third week, they opened the second-half limited banner for female character Yinlin early. To stop the bleeding, they also changed the 21-day banner pace. These moves stabilized retention.

The reputation turnaround happened in the second phase. On June 28, Wuthering Waves released version 1.1, with another 30 free pulls. Players started calling Kuro’s compensation “friend fees.” The popular white-haired character “Jinhsi” debuted, and Wuthering Waves slowed down its story pace, refocusing narrative on the limited characters. Many players returned at that point. On July 22, the second half of 1.1 launched. In Jinhsi’s main story, “Changli,” who had substantial screen time, became a new limited character — Jinhsi as the dragon, Changli as the phoenix. This “Dragon and Phoenix Bring Prosperity” moment made Wuthering Waves players truly feel an emotional connection to the characters for the first time.

Three months later, in August 2024 at TDW 2024, someone asked Li Songlun about his long-term expectations for Wuthering Waves. He said six words:

“Just let it survive.”

People usually say that after the hardest part is over. Having fought its way back, Wuthering Waves began its satisfying comeback run.

After versions stabilized, at the end of 2024, Wuthering Waves made a bold decision. After version 1.4, they jumped straight to version 2.0, with the new region Rinascita ready to launch, closing the story of Jinzhou. Li Songlun explained that they were following a burst-oriented path — the R&D team had long been focused on this big 2.0 version.

Even when the launch reputation was still shaky, Wuthering Waves still bet on the next big version. If this gamble worked, it was foresight; if not, it would be “focusing on one thing at the expense of another.” Market pressure forced a bet — anime games had entered an era of stock competition by 2024, and Wuthering Waves had to compete with lots of groundbreaking new content.

Players will give a game a second chance, but only if they believe it can live long enough to reach that chance.

Kuro bet right again. The public opinion around Wuthering Waves shifted from the launch period’s troll fest and chaos to version 2.0, where purely emotional negative posts became rare.

On listening to players, Li Songlun has a method. The team uses crawler tools and community monitoring to collect feedback, aggregate all comments, and quickly share them with R&D and operations. They monitor by date and time how players react to the game and new updates, whether they’re satisfied with marketing events and story.

This isn’t anything new — almost every game company has its own sentiment management system. But when facing a tidal wave of negative sentiment, how to formulate a proper response plan? Li Songlun’s advice is “systematic” — turn sentiment handling into a process and mechanism integrated into version updates.

With content solid and sentiment warming, Wuthering Waves survived.

In 2025, Kuro’s luck only got better.

The year started with an interaction with Tim Cook. In March, then-Apple CEO Tim Cook appeared at the offline Mac version playtest event of Wuthering Waves in Beijing. Wuthering Waves became one of the first domestic games to support Mac. A Mac device, relatively niche in gaming, met Wuthering Waves, which was on an upward traffic trend — essentially a mutually beneficial commercial exchange. But more importantly, for many founders, standing next to Tim Cook is like a stepping stone to a higher status.

At the end of the year, Wuthering Waves status was also recognized. It won TGA Players’ Voice — the third domestic game to receive this award, after Genshin Impact and Black Myth: Wukong.

From the start to the end of the year, Li Songlun was all smiles in public. Players were happy too. Every time he appeared in a Wuthering Waves pre-show, it turned into a beloved little cringe drama, giving birth to iconic moments like “Could it be?!” and “Win!”

When things go smoothly, you even walk with a breeze. Joy turned into ease and relaxation. In January 2026, at Tencent IEG’s employee conference, Li Songlun appeared as a special guest.

Facing IEG executives like Ma Xiaoyi, he reflected on Wuthering Waves success and directly stated that Tencent’s cost-cutting efficiency measures had released a lot of talent, many of whom joined Kuro — that was one of the core reasons for Wuthering Waves success. At the end of his speech, he added to the entire IEG crowd: “Welcome to join Kuro, join Wuthering Waves.”

The atmosphere peaked. Ma Xiaoyi responded: “We’ll be too embarrassed to ask you to speak again next time.”

This kind of relaxed confidence is Li Songlun’s enduring personal charm. He knows Tencent’s recognition, and he also knows what he has achieved.

The video “Songlun Then vs. Songlun Now” gained 230,000 views this year.

The cover splices two screenshots: on the left, Songlun grinning; on the right, his mouth barely curved. A bullet comment floated by: “Back then, Songlun’s eyes still had light.”

In the comments, one said, “When he had no money, the producer was ‘soft and gentle,’ with a wall behind him and a plastic chair.” Another said, “Before it was too exaggerated, now it’s too calm.”

Around the same time, another video was pushed to many Wuthering Waves players’ feeds: “Songlun in the 3.3 pre-show isn’t playing around anymore — he’s really become ‘Tightlun.’”

“Tightlun” might be the best keyword for Songlun’s state in 2026.

The turning point was probably the 2025 anniversary livestream. Songlun said “Could it be?” many times during the stream, but the content presented ultimately didn’t meet expectations, making many players feel teased. The official team later apologized. More concretely, Songlun’s frequency of smiling in front of the camera noticeably decreased.

Compared to discussing the game, the topic of Songlun himself is also highly popular. Now, “Songlun stopped smiling” has become a frequent phrase among Kuro players.

From loose to tight — think about it, it’s only natural. In 2024, the worst outcome was that Wuthering Waves didn’t take off, and he could go back to polishing Punishing: Gray Raven. In 2026, he is managing over two thousand people, Wuthering Waves just won a TGA popularity award, and Tencent became the major shareholder.

Now, every move he makes is screenshot, turned into memes, and cut into fan edits. His status has changed, more eyes are on him. He has transformed from a game maker into a symbol. When people mention Songlun, they may not be talking just about the person anymore — maybe it’s about version content, about Kuro Games, or about a development model, an era.

From “soft and gentle,” to relaxed, to restrained — the same person, different faces. This is the reshaping that success imposes on a person, and what many players see as “the price of success.”

Players miss the “old Songlun” — not just his smile, but also the down-to-earth producer, the “Bro Songlun” who goofed around on stream, the man who said “Just let it survive.”

Now Wuthering Waves has survived. It’s living very well.

The price is that Songlun can no longer be Songlun.