1.4 billion inhabitants and quite a few of them play a game, Black Myth: Wukong. China is outdoing the rest of the world on Steam single-handedly.
Which game is meant? Black Myth: Wukong is attracting huge crowds to its screens with its setting in the Far East and the legends that practically every child there knows. Before that, however, the download will make the internet lines on the Steam servers glow.
How much was downloaded? According to official data from Steam, around 55 percent of all data downloaded from Steam servers between August 16 and 23 came from China. During this period, a total of 1.2 exabytes of data ended up on storage media in China.
The rest of the world, including the USA, which accounts for around 12 percent of traffic, lags behind China. Germany, by the way, is at a meager 2.5 percent.
Black Myth: Wukong: The final trailer for the action RPG from China
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Black Myth: Wukong makes Steam’s lines glow
How much is 1.2 exabytes? One exabyte (EB) contains 1,000 petabytes or one billion gigabytes (GB). The Chinese downloaded these 1.2 EB at an average of 105.8 megabits per second (Mbps). Our download speed is significantly lower: 68.9 Mbps per second. The USA beats China here at least with 117 Mbps.
How do we know Black Myth: Wukong is responsible? There are no official figures from Valve for this, but there are some pretty clear indications. For example, if you look at the player data on SteamDB for the game, you can quickly see where most players are sitting in front of their computers.
The peaks of the daily rising and falling curve are reached around 2 p.m. UTC, which is the middle of the night in Germany, but in China it is in the evening. Most recently, around 2.5 million people were playing at the peak – probably a large proportion of them Chinese.
This is also suggested by an analysis by Simon Carless from Gamediscovergo: Asia, especially China, is the stronghold for Black Myth: Wukong. The western world is probably quite insignificant for the developers purely in terms of numbers. Based on studies of the language used and information from users, he estimates that around 90 percent of all players of the title come from China. You can find the graphics behind this link to X.
The thickest internet connection – at least for research purposes – is currently in Japan, not far from China. Scientists there have achieved incredible things by achieving download speeds that are unmatched: With the fastest internet connection in the world, you can download Baldur’s Gate 3 or even the new CoD in just a few milliseconds.