Black Myth: Wukong opens to 2.2 million Steam players

Game Science’s Black Myth: Wukong has been out for less than a day, and already, it’s made waves on the PC front.

Per SteamDB, the action-RPG opened to 2.2 million players on Steam, and has quickly climbed the sales charts. At time of writing, it’s the Steam store’s top seller ahead of the Steam Deck OLED, Counter-Strike 2, and the incoming Final Fantasy XVI port.

According to Game Discover’s Simon Carless, the bulk of Black Myth’s PC base on the platform is owed to China. Players in the developer’s home make up 88.1 percent of that player count, followed by the United States, Hong Kong, Canada, and other countries.

While there’ve been several games from China that’ve hit big in the West, Black Myth has been positioned as the most triple-A of them all. It’s had numerous appearances at game events and is effectively a console exclusive for the PlayStation 5, at least for now.

The game has been embroiled in controversy prior to release, namely allegations of a sexist culture from leadership at Game Science. Some of this is embroiled in China’s alleged larger issues about sexism in the tech industry and the developer’s behavior from years prior.

Pre-release, publisher Hero Games published a set of guidelines for streamers. Those rules told streamers to not speak on anything that would cause “negative discourse” like the culture of China’s game industry or “feminist propaganda.”

At time of writing, Game Science hasn’t revealed how Black Myth: Wukong’s PC players translates into sales. Between this and fairly solid reviews, the studio has succeeded in its dreams of making a name for itself in the global games space.