Soulslike action RPG Black Myth: Wukong has only been out for a handful of hours, but it’s already soared past every other game on Steam to snag the platform’s highest-ever 24-hour player count peak.
Per Steam’s own charts, Black Myth: Wukong has already reached a 24-hour peak of 1,903,342 players, which is, of course, also its all-time peak. That’s a handy victory over Counter-Strike 2, which is now in second place with a measly 1,368,431.
Developer GameScience’s game still has a ways to go if it wants to claim the all-time player peak crown, though. That accolade is currently held by Krafton’s PUBG: Battlegrounds, which has an impressive all-time player peak count of 3,257,248.
It goes without saying that this makes Black Myth: Wukong the most successful single-player game of all time on Steam, at least by the metric of highest 24-hour player count.
Other games with a single-player slant, like Elden Ring (953,426 all-time peak) and Cyberpunk 2077 (1,054,388 all-time peak), can’t hold a candle to Wukong‘s numbers, and since the game has only been out for a few hours, its total is only likely to climb as time goes on.
So, where is all of this interest coming from? Well, according to GameDiscoverCo’s Simon Carless, Wukong‘s player base is predominantly Chinese, with 88.1% of the game’s Steam players hailing from China. The next-highest total is the US with 3%, followed by Hong Kong with 1.6%.
Given the fact that Wukong is based on a classical Chinese novel, that split makes a certain degree of sense, but it’s also still pretty early in the day for a lot of Americans, so many from the US won’t have had the chance to play the game yet.
If you’re unfamiliar with Black Myth: Wukong, it’s a single-player action RPG developed by Chinese studio GameScience, and it’s the company’s first game.
Based loosely on the Chinese novel Journey to the West, the game sees a young monkey warrior journeying across a mythical land to recover six artifacts left behind by legendary monkey king Sun Wukong after a fateful battle with the Celestial Court.
Black Myth: Wukong is available right now on PC via Steam, as well as PlayStation 5. The game is also set to arrive on Xbox Series X|S at some point in the future. If you want to know what all the fuss is about, you can check out my review here.
