Black Myth: Wukong smashes Steam concurrent single-player record

What just happened? Black Myth: Wukong has taken the gaming world by storm with its monumental launch on Steam. Within just 24 hours of release, the title claimed the fourth-highest concurrent player count in Steam's history, and it has now broken the concrurrent record for a single-player title.

At the time of writing, Black Myth: Wukong has amassed a staggering 2,223,179 concurrent players on Valve's platform following its Tuesday launch. That's an achievement that puts it ahead of Palworld, which peaked at 2,101,867 players earlier this year.

The real question now is whether the game can dethrone the reigning king, PUBG, and its colossal peak of 3,257,248 concurrent players to become the most-played game in Steam's history. It's certainly an extremely ambitious target and things seem to have cooled off following the initial rush. But who knows?

What's even more impressive is that these figures only account for the Steam version of the game. Black Myth: Wukong has also launched on PlayStation 5, the Chinese gaming platform WeGame, and the Epic Games Store. An Xbox Series X/S release is on the horizon too. It's safe to assume that the game's overall player count is stratospheric.

Beyond player numbers, the reviews tell an equally impressive story. Nearly 150,000 Steam players have weighed in so far, with a stellar 96% positive rating earning the game Valve's coveted "Overwhelmingly Positive" status. Game Science seems to have delivered a remarkably polished experience right out of the gate, which is a big deal in an industry that seems to be plagued by buggy AAA releases of late.

The only potential hiccup could be faced by PC users rocking Intel's 13th- and 14th-gen CPUs. Wukong developers have warned that players with those chips may run into error messages, instability, and crashes during shader compilation, potentially leading to an "Out of video memory" error.

In a pinned Steam community post, the dev team outlined a couple of potential workarounds. For starters, they suggest underclocking the CPU. This can be done by using tools like Intel XTU though it may impact performance. Skipping shader compilation is another workaround, but stability issues could still persist without a proper BIOS update to address the underlying problem. So for now, stay on the lookout for any BIOS and driver updates.