Black Myth Wukong drops nearly two million players in several hours

Black Myth: Wukong launched earlier today, adapting the classic story of Journey to the West to a soulslike action game in the style of Lies of P, Elden Ring, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, and Lords of the Fallen. The game, created by Chinese studio Game Science, has been highly anticipated in the years since it was first announced, and that anticipation has paid off with an absolutely enormous player base. Still, the gargantuan player count that it attracted on PC recently decreased by a huge amount, demonstrating the impact of time zones and audience demographics on Steam’s charts.

Black Myth: Wukong has already started off strong, the action-adventure game garnering a largely positive critical reception. In our review, which awarded the game an 8/10 score, we called Black Myth “a striking adaptation of a beloved literary classic that captures the remote surrealism of Chinese mythology” and “an imperfect but ambitious action RPG that looks to iterate upon FromSoftware’s legacy rather than use it as a crutch.”

This premise has translated to a huge Steam player base, Black Myth Wukong quickly becoming one of the most popular games on Valve’s platform to date. A quirk of that massive player base, though, is its ability to drop off precipitously in accordance with time zones.

At 2pm UTC, Black Myth reached a peak of 2,223,179 concurrent players on Steam. Several hours later, at 9pm UTC, though, its player count had dropped to 290, 791 players. The obvious explanation for this is the strong support that such a high profile Chinese game, its plot pulling from classic Chinese literature, has in the region. 2pm UTC translates to 10pm China Standard Time (CST) while 9pm UTC is 5am CST. Those nearly two million players, in short, probably just logged off.

If you’re in the mood for other games like Black Myth: Wukong, take a look at some of our favorite soulslike games and story games on PC for more.

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