The Daily Populous Wednesday August 21st, 2024 morning edition
Authored by pcgamer.com and submitted by HilariousGaming

Update: The monkey king keeps on climbing. Since this piece went live, Wukong has become the second most-played game on Steam of all time, beating out the likes of Counter-Strike 2 and Palworld. You can find an updated version of this story here.

Original story: That sure didn't take long.

The most-wishlisted game on Steam is now the most-played game on Steam going by current players. As of this writing, less than two hours after launch, more than 1,249,525 people are playing singleplayer action RPG Black Myth: Wukong, rocketing it into the hall of fame for all-time record Steam launches.

It's already easily surpassed an elite list of powerhouse games including Hogwarts Legacy at 879,000, Elden Ring at 953,000, and Cyberpunk 2077 at 1.054 million, all according to SteamDB.

Next in its sights is Dota 2, which it will probably pass by the time this article makes it across the internet and into your eyeballs. The bigger question is whether Black Myth can take down the concurrent numbers of PUBG and Palworld, which set their records in January 2018 and January 2024, respectively, at 3.26 million and 2.1 million.

That seems entirely possible. While both of those games have the advantage of being multiplayer, Black Myth is already putting up wild numbers before noon in China, with most of the rest of the world asleep. It's only going to keep climbing.

If you're tabbed out from the game right now to catch making history, check out our Black Myth: Wukong tips to get a leg up on some of the early challenges.

dtv20 on August 20th, 2024 at 11:54 UTC »

1.8 million peak concurrent players.

vulturevan on August 20th, 2024 at 10:21 UTC »

absolutely edges my balls when articles mention player counts and link to neither the Steam page or the Steam DB page

cite your sources mfs

lycheedorito on August 20th, 2024 at 09:47 UTC »

I'm honestly quite surprised, I didn't feel the hype for this one nearly to the level of Cyberpunk or Elden Ring personally, and it's just overall been kind of not really mentioned much in my circle.