Black Myth Wukong has launched with an absolute staggering player count of 1.4 million players – just on Steam. The fact that the launch has happened over what is a working day; the player count is only expected to go up over subsequent days and especially the weekend. What is also going to help are positive reviews – as of writing the article, the game has launched to Generally Favorable critic reviews, sitting at a score of 82 on Metacritic. The user reviews are still to come in, so we will need to see how those come through – there have been more than a few times when critics have praised the game to the skies but the game has not found favour across the player base.
At the current active player count, the game sits pretty at the top of the charts – beating Counter-Strike 2 which has enjoyed the no. 1 position since a long time with around 900k current active player count and a 24 hour peak of 1.3 million. This is followed by
- Banana | ~600k
- Dota 2 | ~630k
- PUBG Battlegrounds | ~660k
in terms of 24 hour peak active player count.
With this player count, the game also makes it to the fourth highest active player count across all games ever – it joins the company of games like PUBG Battlegrounds with 3.2 million, Palworld 2.1 million, Counter-Strike 2 with 1.8 million peak active player counts. What’s interesting is that Elden Ring, considered to be the definitive experience and an inspiration for al souls-like action RPG shas had a peak of ~950k active player count – which has been beaten by Black Myth : Wukong – considered to one of the several souls-likes has beaten this count comfortably on launch day itself.
The game launched on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series S/X and has been developed by Game Science. Right from the first trailer reveal back in 2020 – which itself garnered around 2 million views on YouTube, the game has been consistently getting good word of mouth with every subsequent trailer and gameplay footage reveals. Black Myth Wukong puts the players in the shoes of The Destined One, and is inspired by the classic Journey To The West. Though there was some controversy on the email apparently received alongwith the review code which mandated no mention of COVID-19, feminist propoganda – although now in hindsight it looks to have been unnecessary, as the players and critics have largely judged the game on the quality of the product rather than any thing else surrounding the game.
