Fans may have seen it as snubbed at The Game Awards, but Black Myth: Wukong has won some well deserved praise by becoming the 2024 Steam release with the highest peak player count, beating out a number of other notable titles to the top spot.
News in brief
- Black Myth: Wukong is the game which has achieved the most peak players for 2024 releases
- Other huge games also topped the list, including Palworld, Helldivers 2, and Path of Exile 2
- Suspected that bots catapulted Banana to third place
Black Myth: Wukong sits pretty atop the list with 2.4 million concurrent players — which is a lot, considering only one other game released this year managed to top even a million. The gap between Black Myth: Wukong, and the second place game, the equally brilliant and celebrated Palworld, is a mere 300,000 concurrent players behind it, at 2.1 million. This doesn't seem like a large gap, except when you consider the gap between the two games is larger than the total concurrent players for the eighth placed game, Last Epoch.
The top two games are closely matched, but there's a big drop off to fourth place, held by Path of Exile 2, totalling 578,569. Marvel Rivals is a late addition to the list, jumping ahead of Helldivers 2 with 480,000 peak players. However, even with Helldivers 2 being overtaken by Marvel Rivals, it's worth pointing out that Rivals is available for free, making Helldivers 2's very close 458,000 an impressive feat.
The eagle-eyed of you may have noticed one entry has been left out of the article so far, and that's because it's more than a little bit controversial. The third place game, with a grand total of 917,000 players is Banana — a free-to-play clicker game where you, er, click a banana to get more bananas, and eventually open lootboxes. Does this seem like an odd addition to the list to you? It should, because it is. The gaming community noticed this oddity when the game came out earlier this year, and it became obvious quickly that the game was being abused by bots to farm Steam trading cards for sale, and to quickly level up Steam accounts for sale. So yeah, not a great addition to the list, but it seems Valve doesn't really care to close it off.
