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The story
Phantom Blade Zero, an action game from a Chinese developer, hit 400,000 concurrent players on Steam right after launch, sparking discussion on the hardware board. Threads covered the bold ¥8,900 price tag, comparisons of its combat to Sekiro, and the fact that its early review rating landed at only “Mostly Positive” (around 77% positive) — along with comparisons to past Chinese-developed titles like Mingmo and Wuchang. Meanwhile, opinions split even on how to read the source data itself, debating whether Steam’s language breakdown reflects the language reviews were written in or users’ client display-language settings.
What people said
You've gotten so worked up you've come full circle — ease up on the 'Great China' ideology already.
If 33% of reviews are in Chinese, the real share of Chinese users has to be even higher than that.
Plenty of Chinese players review in English, but there's no such thing as a Westerner reviewing in Chinese.
Chinese players show zero mercy toward Chinese games.
Remember how badly Mingmo (a Chinese-developed title) got torn apart?
It's done for, man.
I've never seen Nintendo get anything but 100% positive.
I don't really remember Sekiro dealing much damage either, come to think of it.
Isn't it more about breaking their posture and landing a deathblow than raw damage?
For Borderlands 4, Western reviewers were actually harsher than Japanese ones.
It's just a difference in review standards.
If anything, that makes this more worrying —
this game gets bonus points for being a Chinese patriotic title, and it's STILL only "Mostly Positive."
What was Wuchang's peak concurrent player count again?
No way I'm paying ¥8,900 for a game with no multiplayer.
Actually, this one only had a budget of around 1.6 billion yen — charging this much on top of that is pretty bold.
Sounds like something straight out of VIVANT (the Japanese TV drama about corporate espionage in China).
If it doesn't go through, I'll just grit my teeth and keep playing.
There's zero satisfying feedback when you actually land a hit on an enemy.
Which version are you on?
Even on PC, you should use a DualSense.
The DualSense Edge.
Pair it with a GOKU2 (wireless controller adapter) too, and you get proper haptics and adaptive triggers even wirelessly.
Well yeah, it's not even out yet lol
The controller has nothing to do with it.
Combat feel is built from things like sound effects and hit-stop.
It's not "the controller rumbles, so it feels impactful."
Really?
It feels pretty good to me so far.
I mean, out of China's 1.4 billion population, about 100 million count as wealthy.
That's just on a completely different scale from Japan.
If 10 million people counts as "wealthy," then by that logic all 350 million Americans would be wealthy.
is that supposed to be smearing PC gaming?
Wasn't my intention lol
That's obviously a smear no matter how you slice it.
Are you a 'pig' (slang insult for a fanboy) who doesn't even realize you're smearing it?
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
The concurrent-player count shown on SteamDB is simply a snapshot of client connections at a given moment — it is not an official statistic for sales or total player count. It’s a metric that often spikes with launch-day buzz and then drops sharply within a few days. Likewise, Steam review labels like “Mostly Positive” are just categories based on the percentage of positive reviews among all submitted reviews, and a figure around 77% is nothing unusual in itself. What split the thread was whether Steam’s language breakdown counts “the language a review was written in” or “the user’s client display-language setting” — since Valve hasn’t disclosed its exact methodology, this remains speculation among users. It’s worth noting, as a point readers could easily misread, that a high proportion of users with Chinese-language settings doesn’t necessarily mean the actual reviews were written in Chinese.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry (Geha)) thread “Phantom Blade Zero hits 400K concurrent players wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.”
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