Thanks to "Black Myth Wukong": Steam reaches new player record
The success of the Chinese action game "Black Myth Wukong" has led to new user records on Steam. 37 million people were online at the same time.
(Image: Game Science)
Last Sunday, over 37 million people were online on the Steam gaming platform – a new record. This is shown by figures from the unofficial Steam tracker SteamDB. 12.5 million of these Steam users were playing a game at that time, which is also a record.
(Image:Â heise online)
Steam's user numbers are rising regularly, so the gaming platform also sets new records quite frequently. At the beginning of 2023, Steam reached over 10 million active in-game players for the first time, with 32 million logged-in users. By June 2024, 36.9 million players were online at the same time, 11.7 million of whom were playing a video game. Nevertheless, the current particularly high figures seem to exceed the expected increase in player numbers. The action game "Black Myth Wukong" is likely to be the main reason for this.
"Wukong" shoots up to number 2 in the Steam rankings
"Wukong" is currently being played by at least 2 million people simultaneously at peak times every day. The "Wukong" hype reached its peak last Thursday, when the title was played by 2.4 million people at the same time. That is enough for second place in the eternal Steam rankings – Only "PUBG" managed a higher figure, with 3.2 million simultaneous players.
The hype game "Palword" managed 2.1 million concurrent players at the beginning of the year and is in third place in the rankings. The "Concurrent Steam Users" statistic measures the maximum number of people playing a game at the same time. It primarily shows the peak of the hype, but at least allows rough conclusions to be drawn about the financial success and failure of games.
A large proportion of "Wukong" players come from China, where the game was developed by Studio Game Science. "Wukong" is also inspired by the Chinese fable tale "The Journey to the West". The Chinese games market is considered the second largest in the world after the USA.
Black Myth Wukong" caused a stir not only because of the great interest in the game itself, but also because of the strange conditions for streamers. According to a document circulating online, anyone who wants to stream "Wukong" or upload it to YouTube is not allowed to engage in "feminist propaganda" or criticize China's games industry or politics.
(dahe)
