Black Myth: Wukong isn’t just aping the massive success of some of the biggest games out there, it’s smashing them as developer Game Science has announced 10m sales in just three days.
This mammoth sales figure means Black Myth: Wukong is actually one of the biggest videogame launches in history. According to Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad, 10m is enough to surpass Elden Ring and Hogwarts Legacy in the same timeframe. By the beginning of this year, Elden Ring had managed to sell a mind-blowing 24m copies, while Hogwarts Legacy had sold 22m the last time we heard.
How many of those sales are coming from China is difficult to judge. We do know it was the most viewed game on Chinese livestreaming sites on its launch day. Videogame Insights estimates that 80% of the game’s sales have come from China, so in this case that would be around 8m copies, with 2m coming from the rest of the globe.
Black Myth: Wukong also managed to claim 2nd place on Steam’s most played games ever, as judged by peak concurrent players. It managed to hit a staggering 2,415,714 players yesterday, its highest number to date. The highest peaks tend to occur at around 2PM UTC, which is unusual as most games typically see the most players in the evening. 2pm UTC, though, would be around 10pm in Beijing, China.
The game has been so successful in China that sales of the PlayStation 5 have reportedly doubled. That’s impressive because consoles typically don’t do great in China.
In fact, we can actually do a fair bit of interesting speculation about the PS5. According to Game Science’s Twitter post, Black Myth achieved a peak concurrent player count of 3m across all platforms, and since we know what the PC count was, we can estimate that that PC sales have vastly outshone console. If we take the Steam numbers and subtract those from 3m, we approximately 600,000 PS5 players.
I’m currently playing the game right now and intend on reviewing it as soon as possible. I admit, I don’t think it’s as good as the sales numbers would suggest, but I’m still having fun with it and I’m aiming to get the Platinum trophy, if I can.
Congrats to Game Science.