Black Myth Wukong stunned the industry when it rocketed to become the second most concurrently-played game in Steam History, and blew past 10 million sales. Now, it seems it’s not done racking up absolutely huge numbers.
Despite an inevitable decline in players since launch, what’s impressive is just how many it has retained, given the structure of the single player game. After a 2.4 million peak on Steam, just shy of a month later Black Myth Wukong is still putting up a quarter million players every night, 753,447 just yesterday.
The game is 80-90% driven by Chinese players, as the mythology-focused game is huge there and was even officially endorsed by the government. And those players are sticking around, despite the fact that this is very much a linear single player game which has a pretty hard endpoint.
It’s not as if single player games can’t retain players for long periods of time. But we see that with things like Fallout, bolstered with mods, Elden Ring, bolstered by exploration and a recent DLC, or Baldur’s Gate 3 with its million story permutations that require multiple, hundreds-of-hours playthroughs.
Black Myth Wukong has none of that. It’s about 30 hours long for a normal playthrough, closer to 40 or 50 for a “completionist” but other than having a somewhat standard New Game+ mode, there’s not a whole lot to indicate it should have this sort of retention. But it does. People are either loving it over the long term and playing it multiple times, or they’re taking their time with a normal playthrough. Either way, it’s hard not to be impressed by these figures.
It is absolutely likely that Black Myth Wukong will be the top-selling game of the year with 18 million copies moved in its first two weeks. That’s well past last year’s top game, Hogwarts Legacy, which sold 12 million copies in two weeks and ended the year beating out even Call of Duty. Now, Wukong’s only remote competition here is Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and it is hard to imagine that it won’t retain the crown given how wild these figures are, and the fact that it’s clearly continually selling to retain these types of playercounts.
There is already some debate over whether Wukong should be a shoe-in for Game of the Year as that’s what many fans claim. But in a US show like The Game Awards where Wukong reviewed well, but not spectacularly, that seems unlikely in the face of releases like Astro Bot and Final Fantasy VII. That said, that doesn’t take anything away from it being a massive success, and one that is about to print more money with upcoming DLC next year, most likely.
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