Black Myth: Wukong has already become one of the most popular games ever, selling almost as many copies in a single week as Elden Ring or Cyberpunk in their first month.

Black Myth: The first week's sales numbers for Wukong are in and they're firmly in the "Don't drink a lot of coffee before looking at them" zone. As industry analyst Daniel Ahmad noted on X's "The Everything App," 10 million units were sold. This is a record performance that puts some of the biggest releases in recent years to shame.

Here are some numbers to give you a sense of perspective:

• Hogwarts legacy: 15 Million in three months
• Elden Ring: 13 Million in a Month
• Cyberpunk 2077: 13.7 million in a month
• Baldur's Gate III: 20+ Million in Five Months
• Helldivers 2: 12 Million in three months

Black Myth: Wukong is on track to surpass the 19 million players that Palworld had in just two weeks. This sales figure is consistent with Wukong's leapfrogging of the competition and becoming the second most played game in Steam history by concurrent users. It was the most-wanted game on Steam before that, after The Day Before's ignominious demise.

But Wukong is a far better game than its predecessor. Tyler Colp, associate editor at PC Gamer, gave it an 87% rating in our review of Black Myth Wukong. He praised it for being a more approachable version of Souls-style fighting, and for not slavishly copying the genre king. Tyler's description of the game is what makes me want to play it. Some of the situations sound like the best Witcher quests, where Geralt has a fight with a forest sprite, troll, or sprite.

The popularity of Wukong in China, where Game Science is located, is the primary reason for its sales success. Daniel Ahmad, a games industry analyst at Niko, has written a detailed article on this. Steam's previous download bandwidth record, set during Cyberpunk launch, was shattered by Steam's Wukong launch on August 20th. Steam's traffic grew by 28 terabytes/second. 82% of this traffic originated from East Asia. Wukong's gameplay videos and previews have also been dominating Chinese online social networks such as bilibili.

We can expect similar success stories in the Chinese games industry as it experiments with more high-budget releases, like Wukong. There's another one coming up: Mecha Break, a Gundam-inspired hero shooter that's a live-service multiplayer shooter rather than a cinematic campaign, is bringing serious flash and production value to its Gundam inspired take on hero shooting games.