Black Myth: Wukong is already annihilating Steam records

Less than 24 hours after its release, Black Myth: Wukong is already making a massive impact on Steam. The action RPG isn’t just the top-played game on the platform — it also has the second-highest concurrent player count of all time.

Black Myth: Wukong is a new release from developer Game Science that turns the Chinese novel Journey to the West into a Dark Souls-adjacent action game. It’s a major moment for China, as its being touted as the country’s first “AAA” release. Its astonishing Steam player count puts the enormity of that moment into numbers.

At the time of writing, Black Myth: Wukong has had 2,223,179 concurrent players at its peak on Steam, according to SteamDB. That’s enough to give it the second-highest peak of all time, narrowly beating out a record set by Palworld earlier this year. It only trailsPUBG: Battlegrounds, which still holds a firm record of over 3 million players, a number that Black Myth: Wukong could potentially reach.

Those numbers are unheard of for a single-player action gam,e especially one that comes from an entirely new IP and studio. For context, Cyberpunk 2077 only hit just over 1 million concurrent players, while Elden Ring peaked just below that number.

While that may sound surprising at first, the numbers makes sense in context. The game is reportedly activating a large Chinese player base. According to data from GameDiscoverCo founder Simon Carless, over 88% of its current player base is in China. The U.S. is the second biggest piece of the pie with 3% of players residing there, per GameDiscoverCo’s most recent data.

Black Myth: Wukong is now available on PlayStation 5 and PC.