Black Myth:Wukong, a Chinese-madevideo gamebacked byTencent Holdings, took just 83 hours to sell 10 million copies, one of the fastest debuts in industry history. It reached the milestone by Friday evening Beijing time after being released on Tuesday, developer Game Science said on X. Its peak concurrent users, which counts the number of people playing at one time around the world, reached 3 million acrossPCand PlayStation platforms.An action-adventure title based on the mythology around the fabled Monkey King, Wukong was an instant hit and became the most popular single-player title on PC platform Steam on its first day, toppling much-hyped competition like Cyberpunk 2077 and Elden Ring, according to data tracker SteamDB. The game's popularity endured and it set a new high of concurrent players on Steam on Thursday, confirming its position as the biggest PC debut in recent memory.The game is priced at about $38 in mainland China and Hong Kong - versus $60 in the US - and skews heavily toward the local market.It lovingly recreates historic Chinese temples and one of its founders expressed "the simple love" for the nation in a documentary by state news agency Xinhua on the eve of the game's release.Wukong turned profitable on its first day and earned more than $450 million in gross revenue over its first three days, according to Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad. Sony Group ran a sales promotion for its PlayStation 5 in China for the week around Wukong's launch and saw stores sell out of the console, Ahmad added.Counting sales across Valve Corp.'s Steam, Sony's PlayStation 5 and Tencent's WeGame, Wukong has reached the 10 million copies milestone faster than Elden Ring and Hogwarts Legacy, both smash hits in their own right.The strong performance may help shore up expectations that China's $40 billion-plus gaming arena is rounding a corner, after years of regulatory holdups. Developed by Hangzhou-based Game Science, Wukong marks China's biggest PC launch in history. China's video game industry is dominated by titles played on smartphones, not big-budget console or PC games that are released globally. The industry has been in turmoil in China over the last several years. Beijing introduced rules prohibiting young people from playing games online on school days and imposing time limits on games on weekends and holidays.Before its debut Tuesday, a company affiliated with Game Science rankled some influential overseas players with a list of topics to avoid discussing while livestreaming the game, NYT has reported. The list of forbidden subjects laid out in a document under "Don'ts" - politics, "feminist propaganda," Covid-19, China's video game industry policies and other content that "instigates negative discourse" - offered a glimpse of the curbs that content creators face in China as well as the topics deemed sensitive to Beijing.
