Black Myth: Wukong global unit sales 2024

Released on August 19, 2024, and selling 10 million copies within three days, Black Myth: Wukong is one of the fastest-selling video games of all time. Heralded as the Chinese video game industry's first AAA video game production, the title was released on PC and PS5 with an Xbox version following shortly. Black Myth: Wukong was published by Game Science, which is backed by Tencent Gaming, one of the biggest gaming companies in China and worldwide. Lifetime unit sales of Black Myth: Wukong are currently at 18 million units.

A record-breaking game release

After first teasing the game in 2020, the anticipation for Black Myth: Wukong was extremely high. The title made headlines when Game Science revealed that it would transition the game’s development to the newly released game engine Unreal 5, making it one of the first major titles to do so. This hype caused the game to top charts as soon as pre-orders became available in summer 2024. Apart from selling an unprecedented number of copies within just a few days, Black Myth: Wukong crushed the competition in terms of user engagement, setting records as the second-most played video games on Steam based on peak concurrent players. A week post release, Wukong claimed over 2.4 million peak concurrent users on PC, ranking only behind PUBG, which is even more impressive considering that PUBG is a free-to-play online multiplayer title.

Most Black Myth: Wukong’s sales are domestic, based on the fact that the majority of the over half a million reviews on Steam are in Chinese. Additionally, Chinese gamers accounted for about a third of Steam audiences, with nearly 32 percent of Steam users having Simplified Chinese and another 1.2 percent using Traditional Chinese as the language for the PC gaming platform.

China’s gaming industry is starting to take off internationally

Despite being the biggest video gaming market worldwide based on revenue, the Chinese gaming industry has been hampered by a gaming console ban (which has now been lifted), as well as strict regulations regarding video game releases and gaming consumption among citizens. Some of these strict regulations have caused raised eyebrows during the release of Black Myth: Wukong, as gaming content creators and streamers revealed they had been sent a list of topics to avoid talking about while livestreaming the game.

Despite these growing pains, the Chinese gaming industry has been gaining international traction in recent years. Limited to mobile or domestic releases for long, China is now known for leading the way in free-to-play action role-playing titles like Genshin Impact, which gave rise to an entire genre of anime-style open-world online games.

There are several factors that play into the popularity of Black Myth: Wukong. One of the key factors of the action game’s success is the source material – the main character of Black Myth: Wukong is based on Sun Wukong, or the Monkey King, a key character in Journey to the West, a beloved piece of classic Chinese literature which has inspired hundreds of interpretations on TV shows, cartoons, movies, and other media adaptions. The cultural relevance of the topic can be regarded as a soft-power move to promote Chinese culture through media content, which is currently booming internationally as Chinese TV drama productions are also gaining more international popularity among Western audiences.