Black Myth: Wukong sells over 4.5 million copies at launch, according to Chinese analysts

Black Myth: Wukong has attracted millions of players at launch, especially from Chinese users. Here are the first estimates of the game’s sales.

• China’s national game bestseller list estimated that Black Myth: Wukong has sold over 4.5 million copies across all platforms, local financial news media outlet Cailianshe (财联社) reported.
• Analysts noted that the game surpassed 3 million units sold on Steam alone, but it is unclear how the remaining 1.5 million copies are distributed between other platforms (PlayStation 5, EGS, and Tencent’s portal WeGame).
• The article also didn’t specify whether those figures represent worldwide or domestic sales. Black Myth: Wukong is a real phenomenon in China, so it is clear that the vast majority of units sold are now coming from that country.
• According to analysts, Black Myth: Wukong has already grossed over 1.5 billion yuan ($210.2 million). The game’s development and marketing costs, however, remain undisclosed.
• It is worth noting that the title also had a huge amount of pre-orders, which helped it top the Steam charts several times before launch.

In less than 24 hours since its global launch on August 20, Black Myth: Wukong has peaked at over 2.2 million concurrent players on Steam. This is the second-best result of all time on the platform, behind only Krafton’s battle royale hit PUBG: Battlegrounds (3.2 million CCU).

At the moment, the majority of Wukong’s active player base is based in China. According to Steam Scout, over 92% of all reviews for the game were written by local users. For comparison, the share of English-language reviews is only 3.98%.

Player count started to decline around 16:00 UTC, dropping to 200-250k CCU when most Chinese users were asleep (China’s time offset is UTC+8). The numbers are now rising again, reflecting the huge following Black Myth: Wukong has in the country. At the time of writing, over 1.6 million users were playing the game simultaneously (around 19:20 local time).

Black Myth: Wukong’s CCU chart (via SteamDB)

Such fluctuations can be seen in many titles on Steam, whose core audience is Chinese players. For example, Naraka: Bladepoint (China accounts for over 83% of all reviews) also has daily CCU drops between 16:00 and 00:00 UTC.

Naraka: Bladepoint’s CCU chart (via SteamDB)

Black Myth: Wukong currently has an “Overwhelmingly Positive” (96% positive) rating on Steam based on more than 174k reviews from people who purchased it directly on the platform. Developer Game Science has yet to disclose official stats and figures for the game.