Phantom Blade Zero tops Steam’s global best-seller chart at launch

What happened

Phantom Blade Zero went on sale worldwide at 10:00 Beijing time on 29 October. Lanjing News, in a report carried by The Paper, said it had more than 100,000 concurrent players within 20 minutes of launch and reached the top of Steam’s global best-seller chart the same day. The games site 3DM reported that it passed 500,000 concurrent players on Steam within the first hours and was also number one on the US and UK charts.

The game had already led Steam’s global sales chart once before: on 12 August, within a day of pre-orders opening. The analytics firm Alinea Analytics estimated about 850,000 copies had been pre-ordered across Steam and PS5 by 27 October, worth about US$43 million. These are third-party estimates; S-GAME has not published sales figures.[1][2][3][4]

The game and the studio

Phantom Blade Zero is a third-person action role-playing game built on Unreal Engine 5. It mixes Chinese wuxia (martial-arts fiction) with steampunk elements. It has been approved for release in China by the National Press and Publication Administration, which must approve games before they go on sale in China.

S-GAME is based in Beijing and was founded in 2011 by Liang Qiwei (梁其伟), who is also the game’s producer. The game’s world grows out of Rain Blood, a game Liang made with RPG Maker while studying abroad. Tencent took a 25% stake in the studio in 2021. The release was moved from 9 September to 29 October to give the team more time to improve character models and environments.

On PC the standard edition costs ¥268 in China and the deluxe edition ¥328; 3DM gives the overseas Steam price as US$59.99. The PS5 version is a 12-month timed console exclusive.[1][2][3][4][5]

Why Chinese players compare it with Black Myth: Wukong

Black Myth: Wukong, the best-known earlier Chinese single-player action game, has sold more than 30 million copies, according to Lanjing News. In China, games of this scale are often called “3A” titles, after the Western industry term “AAA”.

Lanjing News reported Phantom Blade Zero’s Metacritic average as 88, against 81 for Black Myth: Wukong, and put both games’ development costs at ¥300–400 million. Much of the Chinese coverage presents the launch as a sign that China now has more than one studio making games of this size.[1]