Black Myth: Wukong’s first week of sales numbers are in, and they firmly inhabit “Don’t take a big sip of coffee before you look at them” territory. 10 million units sold, which, as industry analyst Daniel Ahmad pointed out on X, “The Everything App,” is a record-breaking performance that leaves some of the biggest releases of the past few years in the dust.
For perspective, here are some comparative numbers:
The only game that comes close is Palworld’s 19 million players in two weeks, a mark that Black Myth: Wukong seems on track to surpass. It’s a sales figure that lines up with Wukong having leapfrogged the competition to be the #2 most-played game in Steam’s history by concurrent players. Before that, it was also the most wishlisted game on the platform after The Day Before met its ignominious end.
But Wukong is clearly a much better game than the previous wishlist champ. PC Gamer associate editor Tyler Colp awarded it an 87% in our review of Black Myth: Wukong, praising it as a more approachable interpretation of Souls-style combat, differentiating itself from FromSoftware instead of slavishly imitating the king of the genre. The sense of whimsy and magic is what has me really curious to try it, though, with some of the situations Tyler describes in the game sounding like the best kind of Witcher quests where Geralt has to hash things out with a troll or forest sprite or something.
The primary driver of Wukong’s sales success is its popularity in China, where developer Game Science is based. Games industry analyst firm Niko has an in-depth article by Daniel Ahmad breaking this down. 93% of Wukong’s Steam reviews are in simplified Chinese, and Steam shattered its previous download bandwidth record (set during Cyberpunk’s launch) by a whopping 28 terabytes per second on Wukong’s August 20 launch—82% of that traffic originated in East Asia. Gameplay videos and previews of Wukong have also been dominating Chinese social networks like bilibili.
We can likely expect similar success stories as the Chinese games industry experiments with more big-budget releases like Wukong. There’s even another one right around the corner: Although it’s a very different style of game—a live service multiplayer shooter and not a cinematic single player campaign—Mecha Break is bringing some serious flash and production values to its Gundam-inspired take on hero shooters.