A month after launching, Black Myth: Wukong continues to do extremely well. Over on Steam, it’s still consistently bringing over 700,000 concurrent players every single day, and the last we heard it had sold through 18m copies.
Given its huge success, it’s hardly surprising that developer Game Science already has an expansion in the works. But when is it being planned for?
Well, it might be sooner than expected. According to Daniel Camilo, an analyst living in China, “very reliable first hand sources” have informed him that the expansion will release around Chinese New Year, 2025. In other words, sometime around January, 2025.
He does mention that things can always change and release dates can be pushed back.
It would be an impressively quick turn-around for an expansion. This suggests it might be based on content cut from the main game. Early trailers for the game show sequences that never appear in the full release, and Game Science themselves have commented on various things being taken out for budget and time reasons.
Camilo, who has written for various websites in the past including Gameindustry.biz, also says the game has surpassed 20m in sales and that he expects around 20% of the audience to pick up the expansion. That’s around 4m people, though by the time it launches I’m sure that the total sales will have gone up by a few million more.
For a quick comparison, Elden Ring has sold around 25m copies, and the expansion has managed 5m copies. In other words, 20% of the people who bought Elden Ring went on to buy the expansion as well.
Camilo says this estimate comes from a few factors, including the game’s difficulty. Right now, about 34% of players on Steam have managed to beat the final boss and see one of the game’s endings.
“..at least a few millions of the people who bought the game in China are not core/hardcore gamers. For many of those consumers, dlc simply won’t be an interesting proposition.” says Camilo.
Camilo also says that 70% of the game’s sales have come from China, and that by the time the expansion releases, “Novelty & National pride factor will be gone for Chinese consumers.”
