Not only does Black Myth: Wukong emulate the massive success of some of the biggest games, but developer Game Science announced it had sold over 10 million copies in just three days.
This huge sales figure means that Black Myth: Wukong is actually one of the biggest video games of all time. Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad said 10m is enough to surpass both “Elden Ring” and “Hogwarts Legacy” in the same time frame. Elden Ring had sold an impressive 24 million copies earlier this year, and the last time we heard, Hogwarts Legacy had sold 22 million copies.
How many of those sales come from China is difficult to tell. We do know that it was the most-watched game on Chinese live streaming sites on launch day. Videogame Insights estimates that 80% of the game’s sales come from China, so in this case, around 8 million copies were sold, with 2 million coming from the rest of the world.
“Black Myth: Wukong” also successfully ranked second among the most played games of all time on Steam, based on the judgment of the highest number of concurrent online players. Yesterday, it reached a whopping 2,415,714 players, its highest number yet. The highest peaks tend to occur around 2pm UTC, which is unusual since most games typically attract the most players at night. However, in Beijing, China, 2 pm UTC will be around 10 pm.
The game has been extremely successful in China, with PlayStation 5 sales reportedly doubling. That’s impressive because consoles typically don’t do well in China.
In fact, we can actually make some interesting speculations about the PS5. According to Game Science’s Twitter post, Black Myth has peak concurrent players of 3 million across all platforms, and since we know what the PC numbers are, we can estimate that PC sales far outstrip console sales. If we subtract 3m from Steam’s numbers, we have about 600,000 PS5 players.
I’m currently playing the game and plan to review it soon. I’ll admit, I didn’t think it was as good as the sales numbers suggested, but I still enjoyed it and would be aiming for a platinum trophy if I could.
Congratulations Game Science.
