As expected, Black Myth: Wukong has been released globally to a massive success. Millions of players flocked to the game within hours of launch.
Black Myth: Wukong (Game Science)
Following months of pre-release hype and strong pre-orders, Black Myth: Wukong came out on August 20 to positive reviews from critics. Its PC version received an average score of 82/100 on Metacritic based on 57 reviews.
Player reception has also been warm so far. Black Myth: Wukong currently has a “Very Positive” rating on Steam, with 94% of the 28.2k user reviews being positive. In the US PlayStation Store, the game has a 4.78/5 rating based on 5.8k reviews.
At the time of writing, 77.6% of all reviews on Steam are from Chinese players (via Steam Scout). Other languages in the top 5 are English (6.5% of the total, 1,361 reviews), Traditional Chinese (0.67%, 140 reviews), Portuguese – Brazil (0.61%, 126 reviews), and Russian (0.35%, 73 reviews).
This indicates a huge interest in the game in China, especially given its setting (Wukong is based on the classical novel Journey to the West) and the fact that its developer, Game Science, is a local company based in Shenzhen. Another factor is the difference in time zones, so we may expect more reviews from other regions to appear over the weekend.
According to SteamDB, Black Myth: Wukong has already peaked at 1,443,570 concurrent players on Steam. It is unclear how many players launched the game on PlayStation and Chinese platform WeGame.
UPDATE: Game Science’s title is now aiming for truly historic numbers. A few hours after the original article was published, Black Myth: Wukong peaked at 2,223,179 concurrent players. This not only makes it the top 2024 release by peak CCU, but also the 2nd biggest game of all time on Steam by this metric. Therefore, we have updated the headline and data in certain paragraphs below to reflect the changes.
The number will likely increase in the coming hours and days, but Wukong already ranks 1st in peak CCU among all 2024 releases — above the previous leader, Palworld (2.1 million CCU).
Below are the top 10 Steam games by peak CCCU in 2024*:
*Note: The list doesn’t include several games from the SteamDB charts: Banana, which peaked at over 917k concurrent users, because a) it is more of an app for speculations rather than a game (people keep it launched for hours to get tradable cards) and b) it is unclear how many of those are bots; and games that reached their peak prior to 2024 (mostly Early Access graduates like Sons of the Forest and V Rising).
- Black Myth: Wukong — 2.2 million CCU
- Palworld — 2.1 million CCU
- Helldivers 2 — 458.7k CCU
- The First Descendant (free-to-play) — 264.8k CCU
- Last Epoch — 264.7k CCU
- Once Human (free-to-play) — 231.6k CCU
- Dragon’s Dogma 2 — 228.5 CCU
- Content Warning — 204.4k CCU (reached its peak while being free-to-keep in the first 24 hours of launch)
- Manor Lords — 173.1k CCU
- Enshrouded — 160.4k CCU
The peak of 2.2 million CCU also makes Black Myth: Wukong the 2nd biggest game of all time on Steam by peak concurrent players. It is now behind only PUBG (3.2 million CCU).
These are impressive results for a game without multiplayer or live service elements. Black Myth: Wukong has already surpassed Cyberpunk 2077 (1 million CCU) to become the biggest single-player game launch on the platform in terms of peak CCU.
Game Science’s title also topped all-time highs of Valve’s evergreen hits, Counter-Strike 2 (1.8 million CCU) and Dota 2 (1.2 million CCU), as well as games like Elden Ring (953k CCU), Hogwarts Legacy (879k CCU), and Baldur’s Gate 3 (875k CCU).
There is no doubt that Black Myth: Wukong will end up being one of the biggest hits of 2024. So it will be interesting to see its official launch sales (if Game Science reports any).