Black Myth: Wukong launches to almost 1.5 million concurrent players on Steam

simple@lemm.ee to Games@lemmy.world – 93 points –
Black Myth: Wukong on Steam
store.steampowered.com

SteamDB chart showing 1.4 million people playing now

70

Isn't this the game where reviewers/streamers(?) are not allowed to mention feminism?

Reviewers were also forbidden from using trigger words such as "COVID-19" and "quarantine".

So if I posted a review saying that Black Myth: Wukong is as badass as when Rosie the Riveter invented COVID in a Chinese lab, would they be upset?

Not sure, but to be on the safe side just don't title it "Black Myth Wukong is the most impactful global phenomenon to come out of China since the pandemic".

It’s funny to me that they even felt a need for this clause. What does the game have to do with feminism or Covid? It’s based on ancient Chinese mythology in ancient China telling a fictional story featuring Chinese mythological beings that are not real. Why would there be any reason to bring feminism or Covid into that in the first place?

It’s so weird and seems really snowflakey to me.

Why would there be any reason to bring feminism or Covid into that in the first place?

From another article:

The cautionary note against "feminist propaganda" is a reminder that Game Science have yet to respond to allegations of pervasive sexist behaviour from November last year. In a lengthy report for IGN, Rebekah Valentine and Khee Hoon Chan described "a studio plagued by claims of sexism", linking this to misogyny elsewhere in the Chinese games industry and on the government-firewalled Chinese internet. The developers have raised the drawbridge in response: when Edders attended a preview event earlier this year, they refused to say anything on the subject in advance.

The irony is that without the warning to attempt to suppress discussion about that, people might have just forgotten about it.

Lots of streamers will play games while discussing other topics, and those topics can often be seen as controversial. Clearly the company wanted to avoid any video existing where someone was discussing unrelated controversial topics over the top of their gameplay.

It backfired on them cause obviously you can't control everyone and everything but I can understand from a business standpoint their desire to remain neutral and not be part of that crowd.

Look at gamergate. The video game internet world is still not far removed from immensely controversial and offensive behaviors. Maybe they just wanted to avoid any association that could theoretically occur.

I'm not excusing them. Just attempting to understand it in any practival sense without immediately becoming alarmist like everyone does.

Setting aside the CCP angle, it comes off kind of like back when Michael Jordan says all political parties buy Jordan's.

Specifically reviewers who want free keys aren’t allowed to mention the feminism stuff. Any reviewer paying for it out of pocket can’t be silenced or censored

How despicable. Hopefully this will Barbara Streisand in their faces eventually.

This is possibly fake as noted on another thread.

It's real according to someone from Forbes: https://nitter.poast.org/PaulTassi/status/1825193786273681489 . Reviewers didn't get these guidelines but some content creators did, which is why everyone's confused.

Also confirmed by SI.com (which I didn't know had video games writing, and it's surprisingly good as it turns out). GI dot biz published a recap yesterday.

It's been long enough that the publisher would have put out a statement by now if it was false.

Yeah it is confusing. Anyway, I still prefer to judge a game on its merits primarily and not on whether some of the people behind it are jerks or hold views antithetical to my own.

AAA Chinese game, not surprising that it would be so popular but a majority must be Chinese player as it didn't get that much coverage in the rest of the world as far as I understand from everyone's reaction...

The majority of coverage I heard about it were about the scandals at the studio.

Not sure why people downvote you, but most must be. Because I checked the player count this morning in Europe and it was also at 1,5 million. The only ones that play games in early hours of Europe are a majority in Asia, more specifically China. This has also been my experience with online matchmaking in early hours of the day, it's 9 out of 10 chance I got matched with either Chinese or Koreans during those hours.

I knew of this game but had already forgotten about it. Just got notified recently because the benchmark was downloaded a lot past week.

China supports in country stuff, most countries do really, so long as quality is comparable, and its been slowly but steadily getting there. Saw an article posted on lemmy somewhere earlier today how a locally made movie is topping their box office while Deadpool and Wolverine isn't even top 10.

For sure, I wasn't criticizing, just pointing out that it's probably the reason why there's so many players yet barely anyone in this thread had heard about it

It's all over my RSS feeds, so it's certainly being covered now.

There's been some (not exactly scientific) indications that the vast majority of the userbase is in China so it remains to be seen if it was actually a success in the West or not.

Currently trying to avoid as many products as I feasible can that are owned directly by China, plus with the controversy of their review tactics being kind of about, I'll pass on this game and wait for the seas to calm

Hell I'd be afraid to protest torrent this one. At least on consoles their software could only spy on so much.

Seriously guys, you think every digital product coming from China is done specifically to spy on your petty porn habits. Witch hunt 101.

Shoutout to people in the other thread fighting about how nobody has heard of this game and that it isn't highly anticipated

I've barely heard about it, and here in the US, I would not call it highly anticipated, but perhaps the story is different in China.

I’m surprised so many say they never heard about it. It was all over the place when a gameplay trailer was shown a few years ago. David Jaffe even made a video about how he didn’t understand the hype, and then took it all back once the trailer reached the boss fight.

https://youtu.be/4cgYZw5MSxU

I mean I saw it, but it immediately got filed under "Just another pretty-in-renders soulsy clone". There are so many thousands of them, they're just some background buzz in game releases.

And I'll readily admit, I don't even know whether it is a soulslike, and neither do I care to find out. That's how invisible this game is when you scroll past it, as it immediately mascerades as a game in an ocean of utterly samey titles.

I enjoy a lot of games but don't follow IGN or similar outlets. I did pay attention to e3 when it happened but that's no longer a thing. My news comes mostly from steam store/Lemmy gaming communities/memes Meaning I've never hear of it either until I saw Dunkey's satire video.

I've never heard of it. But we all live in our own spheres

How many of those 1.5 million are from China?

Does it matter? The scale of population makes US literally irrelevant in this conversation.

Ah, yes. The two countries of the world. China, and the US.

That's where most of the gaming population of the world is innit? Excluding China, if a game doesn't have a playerbase in the US it's very unlikely to chart on Steam and is therefore unlikely to be "popular". Only exceptions are games like Football Manager and they are not the norm.

Crazy. Never heard of it.

This is proof that lemmy crowd is a totally isolated minority. This is one of the most anticipated games of the year.

Yes, I am only on Lemmy. I do not engage with other communities around the internet nor do I talk to anyone from the outernet. Especially not my friends who also like to play games.

Jfc, game literally came out today and the fanboys are already insufferable.

As the second person on lemmy I think I’ve heard of it but nothing really comes to mind, should ask my other buddies who are into gaming tho

I haven't played the game. I'm not a fanboy but this game has so many creators making content since way back to the trailer launch. Almost all major outlets made articles about it since then. This was considered one of the anticipated games of this year. Idk millions of views and million and half playing are all chinese according to other commentator above you.

I'm not attacking you. It was not my intention. I'm just calling out what I see. I hope you dont take this to heart too.

They're probably playing casual furry games lol

Surely China wouldn't use their infamous and vast network of bot farms to push it's most anticipated game of the year. Surely.

Ignoring all of the drama around it, it genuinely looks like a well made game. Will be waiting for the DRM to expire before trying it out.

Well

I must be sincere, and say I would never expected this

It's more players than Elden ring or Baldur's gate 3 at launch.

I don't think that should be terribly surprising. Both those games are targeted at specific niches. They were notably successful for gaining popularity beyond their niches, but they were still niche products. Elden Ring is still incredibly obtuse and will fucking murder you out the gates and just expect you to pick yourself up and try again. BG3 is a D&D game that expects you to know the tabletop version to a degree. Both are awesome, but they're aimed at narrower markets

I don't think the people I know who played BG3 had ever touched D&D. Elden Ring hit a huge audience, many of whom had never tried Souls games before.

Fair enough on Elden Ring actually, I looked up the sales numbers and it did do very well for any videogame rather than "just" very well for a FromSoft game as I had thought

Is that true? That's pretty nuts.

Is it, though? The Chinese "government" decides which games their subjects are allowed to pay, and this game is one of the handful of new games allowed each year.

Looked up a video of the gameplay last night, and it looks pretty cool. I wonder if it feels as good as it looks. Apparently this is a company that previously only made mobile games.

Is this a souls like game?

I read some reviews comparing it more to God of War and Jedi Survivor games.

Which sounds pretty good to me, although the style of the game hasn't been really been appealing to me (yet).