Black Myth: Wukong preloads smash Steam's all-time bandwidth records, beating Cyberpunk 2077's enormous peak as 70 terabytes are downloaded every second

Black Myth: Wukong - Sun Wukong chugs a flask whilst facing down a massive enemy — (Image credit: Game Science)

There are clearly a lot of people excited about Black Myth: Wukong, as it has managed to beat Cyberpunk 2077's peak download bandwidth usage on Steam ahead of its release tomorrow.

While bandwidth usage might not be the stat that we often look at on Steam, with many often focusing more on concurrent player counts to judge a game's popularity, before and during a game's launch the site's bandwidth is a solid indicator of how many people are rushing to download things. We saw this back in 2020 with the launch of Cyberpunk 2077 – as flagged in this Reddit post at the time, the site's download bandwidth spiked to 51TB per second on December 12, the Saturday following the game's launch.

Well, we're now seeing a similar spike with Black Myth: Wukong and this one is even bigger than Cyberpunk 2077's. Preloads for Game Science's new action RPG went live yesterday, and Steam's download bandwidth usage promptly spiked to 70TB per second, which is enormous. The majority of this usage was from Asia, which alone accounted for 59.3TB per second at the peak, followed by North America at 7.8TB, and Europe closely behind at 7.6TB.

It's worth noting that this bandwidth usage is across Steam as a whole, so there's bound to be some usage in there that isn't from Black Myth: Wukong. Also, when comparing it directly to Cyberpunk 2077, it's worth noting that the upcoming action RPG has a much larger storage space requirement, demanding at least 130GB rather than 70GB, so it'll be more demanding on that bandwidth in the first place. However, it's still indicative that Game Science could have a huge hit on its hands when the action RPG launches on PC and PS5 tomorrow, especially looking at the overall positive scores like in our own Black Myth: Wukong review.

For more games like Black Myth: Wukong, be sure to check out our roundup of the best action games you can play right now.

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I'm GamesRadar+'s Deputy News Editor, working alongside the rest of the news team to deliver cool gaming stories that we love. After spending more hours than I can count filling The University of Sheffield's student newspaper with Pokemon and indie game content, and picking up a degree in Journalism Studies, I started my career at GAMINGbible where I worked as a journalist for over a year and a half. I then became TechRadar Gaming's news writer, where I sourced stories and wrote about all sorts of intriguing topics. In my spare time, you're sure to find me on my Nintendo Switch or PS5 playing through story-driven RPGs like Xenoblade Chronicles and Persona 5 Royal, nuzlocking old Pokemon games, or going for a Victory Royale in Fortnite.