Black Myth: Wukong, a Chinese-made video game backed by Tencent Holdings Ltd, took just 83 hours to sell 10 million copies, one of the fastest debuts in industry history.

It reached the milestone by Friday (Aug 23) evening Beijing time after being released on Aug 20, developer Game Science said on X. Its peak concurrent users, which counts the number of people playing at one time around the world, reached three million across PC and PlayStation platforms.

An action-adventure title based on the mythology around the fabled Monkey King, Wukong was an instant success and became the most popular single-player title on PC platform Steam on its first day, toppling much-hyped competition like Cyberpunk 2077 and Elden Ring, according to data tracker SteamDB. The game’s popularity endured and it set a new high of concurrent players on Steam on Thursday, confirming its position as the biggest PC debut in recent memory.

The game is priced at about US$38 in mainland China and Hong Kong - versus US$60 in the US - and skews heavily toward the local market. It lovingly recreates historic Chinese temples and one of its founders expressed "the simple love” for the nation in a documentary by state news agency Xinhua on the eve of the game’s release.

Wukong turned profitable on its first day and earned more than US$450mil in gross revenue over its first three days, according to Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad. Sony Group Corp ran a sales promotion for its PlayStation 5 in China for the week around Wukong’s launch and saw stores sell out of the console, Ahmad added.

Counting sales across Valve Corp’s Steam, Sony’s PlayStation 5 and Tencent’s WeGame, Wukong has reached the 10 million copies milestone faster than Elden Ring and Hogwarts Legacy, both considered smash hits in their own right.

The strong performance may help shore up expectations that China’s US$40bil-plus gaming arena is rounding a corner, after years of regulatory holdups. This summer marked an unusually busy season of major debuts, including Tencent’s DnF Mobile, NetEase Inc’s Naraka: Bladepoint Mobile and indie studio Mihoyo’s ZZZ. Developed by Hangzhou-based Game Science, Wukong marks China’s biggest PC launch in history.

 - Bloomberg