More Chinese success as Phantom Blade Zero enjoys a big launch and becomes one of Steam's most played games

Phantom Blade Zero has been officially released, and just as everyone expected, it's popular. The wuxia action game from S-Game debuted to a massive 431,541 concurrent players on Steam (via SteamDB) at its peak just hours ago.

At the time of writing, Phantom Blade Zero is Steam's second most-played game, landing just below Counter-Strike 2, and it's currently leading Steam's global top sellers chart, having jumped 16 places this week. Players appear to be happy with the final game, too, judging by early user reviews on Steam, which currently have it sitting at a Mostly Positive average.

S-Game has yet to announce any sales figures, but the game was estimated to have sold more than 1m copies just before launch. According to Alinea Analytics analyst Rhys Elliott, Phantom Blade Zero sold 850,000 copies across PC and PlayStation 5. It is also available on Tencent WeGame in China, where Elliott estimates it sold enough to bring the total to well above 1m copies.

A few days earlier, Elliott estimated Phantom Blade Zero to have sold 500,000 on Steam. The analyst indicated that 80,000 copies were sold after reviews were published two days before the game's 28th October release. As impressive as all of that is, it pales in comparison to Black Myth: Wukong's sales performance - another Chinese-developed action title. When Wukong released in 2024, the game peaked at 2,415,714 concurrent players on Steam, and is estimated to have sold over 30m copies lifetime.

Elliott said on X he doesn't believe Phantom Blade Zero will be able to achieve that level of success, but he predicts strong sales this year regardless - which is already borne out by the available data.

Seeing as the game has benefited from the pre-launch hype, word of mouth may help boost these numbers further. By the weekend, we could be looking at well above 500,000 peak concurrents on Steam.

In Eurogamer's review of Phantom Blade Zero, Emma Kent lamented a general lack of polish and pace-breaking boss fights, which put a dampener on her enjoyment of the best parts of the game: swordplay and combat.