Phantom Blade Zero is tracking to be the next big thing out of China, according to Alinea Analytics . The firm reckons that the game has already sold 300K units on Steam in the few days since pre-orders opened , generating $14.5M in revenue . Phantom Blade Zero also leads this year's Steam wishlist chart, with 1.6 million users who already wishlisted the game.
At this point, the big question is whether it can fully match the enormous success of Game Science's Black Myth: Wukong , which sold 30 million units in less than two years , becoming by far the biggest triple-A game out of China. Alinea's Rhys Elliott talked about this very topic with Chinese game consultant Daniel Camilo , who said:
The hype [in China] is nowhere near what it was like for Black Myth: Wukong, but considerably higher than what we saw before the launch of Wuchang. Phantom Blade Zero is “much more a ‘gamers’ thing’, but in a big way.
Still, Camilo reckons that could change in the lead up to the game's launch on October 29 :
Phantom Blade Zero has a publishing license for Mainland China and will release in the country simultaneously with the rest of the world, so that will allow S-GAME and all its partners to visibly boost the marketing beyond what most games who don’t have a license usually do in China. We’ll see a lot more IRL [in-real-life] offline promotional activities and exposure, and not just the usual online marketing blitz other premium games launch to here, generally.
Based on Alinea Analytics figures from Steam, Phantom Blade Zero has sold 73% as much as Black Myth: Wukong at this point before release; conversely, it has sold 6.4x more than Wuchang: Fallen Feathers ( which is getting a sequel after all , by the way) with 70 days to go before the launch.
Overall, the takeaway is that i t might be hard for the game to sell as much as Wukong, but then it doesn't really need to . Even getting relatively close would be a huge success for a studio that's making its first triple-A premium game for PC and consoles, and if reviews turn out to be good, Phantom Blade Zero could indeed get quite close to Wukong's record-breaking numbers .
About the author : With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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