Stellar Blade sold a million units in 3 days on PC and you can mostly thank Chinese players

Have you been playing Stellar Blade? If not, you may be some kind of statistical outlier, as Shift Up recently came out and announced that the game had sold over 1 million copies on PC in its first three days alone.

Which isn't bad. I've never done a million of anything, let alone in three days, so a tip of the hat to the team on that one. No wonder the game crept into Steam's top 100 all-time most-played by concurrent players last weekend. It took the 81st spot on Sunday with 192,078 players online at once.

Across all platforms, Stellar Blade has sold 3 million copies across its lifetime. So hey, not bad going for us—we make up fully ⅓ of the game's sales after just a few days of availability. Don't underestimate PC gamers: we are pathologically unable to not spend money on things.

Per analyst Daniel Ahmad (via Gamespot), Stellar Blade can attribute the majority of its desktop success to China, where people are apparently going hog-wild for the game. Its PC Chinese dub wasn't available on console until the PC version launched and—in the mighty renminbi—the game costs a trifling $38.

Alas, our own reviewer wasn't quite as hot on the game as the nation of China apparently is. Our Mollie Taylor handed out a score of 68% in our Stellar Blade review and said what, while it "may be the smoothest, most optimised PC port I've played in a hot sec," it suffers from "a middling story and a painful tutorial level" and—in general—a feeling that it wasn't doing much you hadn't seen done better before. Still, it's a "decently solid soulslite," and honestly? Sometimes that's all you're looking for.

Well, that and like 400 skimpy outfits and a bunch of alarmingly adult mods.