Black Myth: Wukong makes record-breaking debut on Steam

Just hours after its debut, Black Myth: Wukong is already breaking records on Steam. Black Myth: Wukong is currently the top-played game on Steam with a peak of 2,151,942 concurrent players at the time of writing. That puts developer Game Science’s retelling of Journey to the West in the second slot for the highest concurrent player counts ever on Steam, following only PUBG: Battlegrounds, which peaked at 3,257,248 in January 2018. Black Myth: Wukong has surpassed Elden Ring, Dota 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Counter-Strike 2, and Palworld — all of which hold formidable concurrent player records. Black Myth: Wukong is also available on PlayStation 5 and Windows PC via the Epic Games Store and Chinese platform WeGame; the record on Steam does not account for players on those platforms. WeGame reportedly has around 80 million players per month, according to an FAQ page for developers. Steam had 132 million monthly active users in 2021. GameDiscoverCo founder and analyst Simon Carless estimates that at around 5 a.m. ET, 88.1% of the concurrent players were based in China, with 3% from the United States, 1.6% from Hong Kong, and 1% from Japan. That breakdown is likely to shift as the United States playerbase wakes up and logs on. Bloomberg reported Tuesday that Black Myth: Wukong “generated a level of buzz the [Chinese] gaming industry hasn’t seen in years,” with the game holding the top spot for trending topics on Chinese social media site Weibo. Black Myth: Wukong is based on the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West, and players take on the role of Sun Wukong, the Destined One, throughout the role-playing game. Though it was released on Aug. 20 for PlayStation 5 and Windows PC, an Xbox Series X release is expected at a later date. Aside from its massive player base, Black Myth: Wukong has reviewed well, with an early score of 82 on review aggregator Metacritic. In our review, Polygon called the game “an epic saga that’s both confounding and spectacular to behold.” However, its release has not been without controversy: Publisher Hero Games (acting on behalf of Game Science as a co-publisher on the game) sent out a strange missive to some game streamers, asking them not to discuss the Chinese video game industry or “feminist propaganda” during their streams.