Phantom Blade Zero has arrived, and PC players showed up in force. S-Game’s wuxia action RPG launched on PlayStation 5 and PC on Oct. 28 at 7 p.m. PT (Oct. 29 at 10 a.m. Beijing time), and within hours it had climbed past half a million concurrent players on Steam, according to SteamDB figures reported by GamingBolt.
That puts it second only to Counter-Strike 2 on Steam’s live player chart, ahead of every other game on the platform. It also took the No. 1 spot on Steam’s top sellers list by revenue, pushing past Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, as IGN reported early in launch day. The standard edition costs $59.99.
Analytics firm Alinea estimates the game sold more than a million copies before launch, with roughly two-thirds of those sales coming from mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. The firm’s numbers are estimates, and S-Game has not shared official sales figures yet. User reviews on Steam sat at Mostly Positive, around 79%, in the first hours, according to PCGamesN.
S-Game CEO Soulframe Liang marked the launch with a letter to players that traced the project back to Rainblood: Town of Death, the RPG Maker game he made years before founding the studio. Liang called the decision to turn that small project into a full action RPG “a suffocating decision” at the time, and singled out art director Michael Chang and music director Caisheng Bo, who wrote more than 10 hours of music for the game.
The studio also posted launch-day advice for PC players on Nvidia hardware, saying driver version 621.01 has shown stability problems and recommending players stay on 617.42 for now.
S-Game’s launch trailer, released last week, shows off the kungfupunk setting and the game’s fast-paced sword combat:
Players follow Soul, a warrior framed for his master’s death and left with just 66 days to live, as he fights through the Wulin in search of a cure. The game is digital-only for now. As we covered when the launch trailer arrived, physical PS5 editions, including Standard, Deluxe and Ultimate versions, are planned for 2027.
