The action role-playing game Black Myth: Wukong by the Chinese studio Game Science has quickly climbed the gaming charts and become one of the most talked-about releases of the year. On its debut day, it attracted over 2.35 million players and set a new benchmark in livestreaming, emerging as the most successful 2024 game release in terms of viewer engagement.
Black Myth: Wukong has captivated both gamers and streamers alike. On its release day, the game amassed over 5.5 million Hours Watched on Twitch, outpacing major titles like Grand Theft Auto V, Minecraft, and League of Legends to become the most-watched game on the platform. Additionally, Black Myth: Wukong reached a peak concurrent viewership of 485,300 on Twitch, making it #1 game and third most-watched category of the day. It was only surpassed by the non-gaming/IRL categories Just Chatting and Special Events that featured Gamescom 2024 streams.
Black Myth: Wukong was first announced four years ago, and a short gameplay preview at that time sparked tremendous excitement in the gaming community. Fans worldwide eagerly awaited the game's release, and the anticipation on launch day was overwhelming. Steam stats (collected by Steamcharts) suggest that over 2.35 million concurrent players logged into Black Myth: Wukong on its debut day; this is the second-highest result among all games on the platform ever, with only PUBG: Battlegrounds having had more concurrent players.
The highly anticipated release also captured the attention of top Twitch streamers. Some even labeled Black Myth: Wukong as a potential "Game of the Year" in their stream titles. Moreover, the game became a test for high-performance PCs, with several streamers setting out to play it on maximum settings, given the impressive graphics shown in the trailers.
In the days leading up to the release of Black Myth: Wukong, chat mentions related to the game were under 5,000 per day. However, on August 20, this figure surged to 61,000. During the same time, the number of Twitch chatters discussing the game also saw a dramatic increase, rising from 3,000 to 8,600.
"Black Myth: Wukong had an outstanding launch in livestreaming, becoming the most successful game release of 2024 so far in terms of viewership on release day. Its impressive debut is even more significant given that it's a singleplayer title, not a multiplayer game like Palworld, which typically draws more live streamers. It will be interesting to see if any other games this year, like Star Wars: Outlaws, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, or EA Sports FC 25, can surpass its first-day success."
Nazar Babenko, Product Manager of Streams Charts
On launch day, the most popular streamer for Black Myth: Wukong was American content creator zackrawrr, whose broadcast drew over 71,300 viewers. He also led in Hours Watched, sharing the top spot with Canadian streamer shroud, with both accumulating 198,000 hours of watch time. Other prominent streamers who featured Black Myth: Wukong include alanzoka, Elajjaz, eliasn97, GRONKH, xQc, and several others.
The most popular language for Black Myth: Wukong streams was English, which made up 39% of the total watch time on release day. Russian and Chinese followed, contributing 12.6% and 11.3%, respectively. The significant share of Chinese streams is noteworthy, as this level of engagement is rare for major titles. This can be attributed to long marathon streams by Taiwanese broadcasters, many of whom streamed nearly around the clock.
The dominance of English is expected, given Twitch's primary English-speaking user base. However, it is surprising that Spanish did not rank among the top three languages, despite its widespread use. The major reason is that the leading Spanish-speaking streamers, apart from Rubius and exlokas, did not cover the Black Myth: Wukong release.
More than 60% of the channels covering the Black Myth: Wukong release were run by English-speaking streamers. Channels in Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian each accounted for about 6% of the coverage.
Black Myth: Wukong had the most successful launch on Twitch among all new releases of 2024. The game outperformed Palworld, Dragon’s Dogma II, Wuthering Waves, and other titles in watch time. It also set a record for peak concurrent viewership among titles, reaching 485,300 concurrent viewers, the highest of any gaming release this year.
The success of Black Myth: Wukong was impressive, even though streamers, on the whole, gave the title a bit less attention than some other releases this year. On release day, it was covered by just over 26,000 channels, slightly fewer than Wuthering Waves (26,300 channels) and significantly less than Palworld (30,300 channels).
Among recent releases, Black Myth: Wukong stands out when compared to Hunt: Showdown 1896. This demon-hunting shooter, which was released on August 15, needed five days to reach the same number of Hours Watched that Black Myth: Wukong accumulated in less than a day on its release. Despite this, Hunt: Showdown 1896 did manage to enter the top 10 categories on Twitch for a short time, as discussed in our detailed coverage of the game.
