Black Myth: Wukong smashes Palworld and Counter-Strike 2 to become the second most-played Steam game of all time less than a day after launch, and it's gaining on PUBG's gold medal

(Image credit: Game Science)

Friends, we've got a live one. After easily crushing the concurrent player records of both Elden Ring and Cyberpunk 2077, Black Myth: Wukong looks like it's cruising into place as one of the biggest Steam launches of all time. With just over 2.1 million concurrent players at time of writing—11 hours after launch—it's got the second-place record for most concurrents on Steam ever, per SteamDB charts.

Until today, the first, second, and third-place record holders for most concurrent players on Steam were PUBG, Palworld, and Counter-Strike 2 (at 3.2 million, 2.1 million, and 1.8 million players respectively). Wukong has totally upended that, knocking CS2 and Palworld off their bronze and silver podium spots and leaving only PUBG's record intact (for now).

What explains its meteoric rise? You can point to plenty of things, of course. The most obvious is that Black Myth: Wukong is a highly anticipated release out of a Chinese development studio. Arousing the interest of the Chinese market—forecasted to be home to 730 million gamers in as little as three years—is a pretty solid way of getting your numbers up at launch.

That's not to belittle Wukong's achievement. It's not just the game's appeal to Chinese audiences that's made it so successful. Our own Tyler Colp had a blast with the game, scoring it 87% in his Black Myth: Wukong review and praising it for hitting "similar highs" to Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree. It's a love-in over in the Steam reviews, too: The game has a 96% "Overwhelmingly positive" rating off the back of 64,000 reviews at time of writing.

So it's a (by all accounts) great game that's garnered a huge amount of interest, particularly in a market with a truly gargantuan potential audience. Mystery solved then, eh? I say not. If you ask me, the real lesson of Black Myth: Wukong is that the gamers are absolutely starving for more games about monkeys. A new Ape Escape would absolutely clean up right now.

Or maybe it's the other things. Fine. Either way, PUBG shouldn't rest easy. The million-player gulf between Wukong's current player count and PUBG's all-time record might seem insurmountable, but you could have said the same thing about CS2 and Palworld's records mere hours ago. The line on that graph keeps climbing, and it's anyone's guess as to where and when it'll level off.

One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.