Black Fantasy: Wukong’s first week of gross sales numbers are in, and so they firmly inhabit “Do not take an enormous sip of espresso earlier than you take a look at them” territory. 10 million items offered, which, as trade analyst Daniel Ahmad identified on X, “The The whole lot App,” is a record-breaking efficiency that leaves a number of the greatest releases of the previous few years within the mud.
For perspective, listed below are some comparative numbers:
The one recreation that comes shut is Palworld’s 19 million gamers in two weeks, a mark that Black Fantasy: Wukong appears on monitor to surpass. It is a gross sales determine that strains up with Wukong having leapfrogged the competitors to be the #2 most-played recreation in Steam’s historical past by concurrent gamers. Earlier than that, it was additionally essentially the most wishlisted recreation on the platform after The Day Earlier than met its ignominious finish.
However Wukong is clearly a significantly better recreation than the earlier wishlist champ. PC Gamer affiliate editor Tyler Colp awarded it an 87% in our assessment of Black Fantasy: Wukong, praising it as a extra approachable interpretation of Souls-style fight, differentiating itself from FromSoftware as a substitute of slavishly imitating the king of the style. The sense of caprice and magic is what has me actually curious to attempt it, although, with a number of the conditions Tyler describes within the recreation sounding like the most effective form of Witcher quests the place Geralt has to hash issues out with a troll or forest sprite or one thing.
The first driver of Wukong’s gross sales success is its reputation in China, the place developer Sport Science relies. Video games trade analyst agency Niko has an in-depth article by Daniel Ahmad breaking this down. 93% of Wukong’s Steam opinions are in simplified Chinese language, and Steam shattered its earlier obtain bandwidth report (set throughout Cyberpunk’s launch) by a whopping 28 terabytes per second on Wukong’s August 20 launch—82% of that visitors originated in East Asia. Gameplay movies and previews of Wukong have additionally been dominating Chinese language social networks like bilibili.
We are able to probably anticipate related success tales because the Chinese language video games trade experiments with extra big-budget releases like Wukong. There’s even one other one proper across the nook: Though it is a very completely different model of recreation—a reside service multiplayer shooter and never a cinematic single participant marketing campaign—Mecha Break is bringing some critical flash and manufacturing values to its Gundam-inspired tackle hero shooters.
