Pre-orders for Phantom Blade Zero opened on August 11, 2026, across the PlayStation Store, Steam, and the Epic Games Store. In the weeks since, the verifiable market signals have come from three distinct places: a No. 1 spot on SteamDB's global weekly chart, a producer who says demand has run past his studio's expectations, and a third-party estimate of roughly 300,000 PC pre-orders attributed to the analysis firm Alinea Analytics. S-Game has never published an exact pre-order figure, so this article keeps the sources separate and labels each number for what it is: which chart placements can be checked directly, which figures are model-based estimates, and what each of them can and cannot tell you before the game launches on October 29.
How the pre-order window opened
The timeline starts with the gold master. On August 5, S-Game announced that development on Phantom Blade Zero was complete — the milestone usually described as "going gold" — and that pre-orders and an 11-minute trailer would go live together on August 11, with pre-orders available on PSN, Steam, and the Epic Games Store. According to media coverage, the trailer packed in new story scenes, characters, and combat, and it settled one lingering question at the end: Donnie Yen, who has served as a consultant on the game since 2023, also appears as the facial and motion capture actor for Mó Yuan, the father of the protagonist Soul.
Pre-orders went live as planned on August 11. Director Soulframe Liang confirmed the launch in a PlayStation Blog post the same day and pointed to a dedicated State of Play on August 17. That near-20-minute deep dive became one of the defining moments of the pre-order window — one of the most substantial looks at the game before launch — focusing on the weapon-build system: Soul can collect more than 30 primary weapons and 25 secondary weapons known as Phantom Arms, plus accessories that adjust a build, alongside footage of side quests, difficulty settings, and story characters. Our State of Play recap covers the showcase in detail. In China, WeGame and TapTap PC opened pre-orders around the same time; the differences between storefronts and editions are compared item by item in our pre-order guide.
Pricing is worth pinning down here, because it becomes the yardstick for one of the estimates later. The Steam page currently lists the Standard Edition at $59.99 in the US and ¥268 in China, with the Digital Deluxe Edition at $69.99 and ¥328 respectively; both editions contain the same game, with the Deluxe adding cosmetic items plus a digital art book and soundtrack.
One more piece of context matters for everything that follows. The game was originally scheduled for September 9, 2026; in early June, S-Game announced in a public letter from Liang that it had moved to October 29, with the extra fifty days earmarked for polishing the day-one experience. The pre-order window therefore opened after the delay, roughly eleven weeks before launch, and runs about eighty days in total — longer than most big releases get, which is useful background when weighing the chart records below.
Where the game stands in the charts
The hardest number on the board comes from SteamDB. On the site's global top sellers chart for the week of August 11 to 18 — a ranking based on revenue — Phantom Blade Zero took first place. Steam's top sellers chart folds pre-order revenue into the week it is earned, so the No. 1 spot measures how much players spent on a game that had not yet unlocked, during the first full tracking week after pre-orders opened. For a premium single-player title, topping the weekly chart while still unreleased means that in that week, no shipped game on Steam — anywhere in the world — out-earned it.
The heat did not fade after day one either. Per reports from GCores and 3DM on August 12, the game topped both Steam's global and China-region top sellers the same day pre-orders went live; on August 19, 17173 reported that Sony had given it a front-page splash on the US PlayStation Store — a placement the outlet described as second only to Grand Theft Auto VI among current pre-orders. Chart positions move constantly, and a storefront splash is marketing placement rather than sales data; but demand burning across Steam and console storefronts alike within the first week lines up with what the studio itself was saying publicly.
Where the 300,000 estimate comes from
The most quoted figures in circulation come from Alinea Analytics, a market analysis firm. According to estimates by its analyst Rhys Elliott, as reported by GamingBolt and other outlets in late August, Phantom Blade Zero had reached roughly 300,000 pre-orders on Steam, worth around $14.5 million, and had crossed 1.6 million wishlists on Steam — enough, by its count, to rank first among 2026's yet-to-release games by wishlist volume.
Alinea supplied one reference point to frame that start: at the equivalent pre-release stage, Phantom Blade Zero's pre-order volume stood at roughly 73 percent of Black Myth: Wukong's — a comparison Tencent News' August 25 report summarized as "pre-launch sales reaching 73% of Black Myth: Wukong's same-period figure." It did not outpace Wukong, but as a pre-order curve it is starting from the same order of magnitude.
A second reference comes from games analyst Daniel Camilo, who put it qualitatively: the pre-release hype for Phantom Blade Zero is nowhere near Black Myth: Wukong's, yet considerably higher than what Wuchang: Fallen Feathers saw before its own launch. Black Myth: Wukong remains the ceiling in this comparison — one of the most commercially successful Chinese premium games ever made — and whether Phantom Blade Zero ever gets close to that level is a question nobody can answer today.
| Figure | What it measures | Source and status |
|---|---|---|
| No. 1 on Steam's global weekly chart | Week of August 11–18, by revenue | SteamDB weekly chart, publicly checkable |
| No. 1 on Steam's global and China top sellers | Reported August 12, day one of pre-orders | |
| ~300,000 PC pre-orders, ~$14.5 million | As of late August | Alinea Analytics estimate, not official |
| ~1.6 million wishlists | As of late August | Alinea Analytics estimate, not official |
| 1 million+ wishlists | December 2025, 15 days after wishlists opened | S-Game official announcement |
These five rows are not the same kind of truth. The one-million-wishlist milestone is an official announcement — a settled fact. The two chart placements come from public, checkable statistics. But the "300,000 pre-orders," the "$14.5 million," and the "1.6 million wishlists" are all outputs of a third-party model: Alinea's methodology has not been published in full, and S-Game has never confirmed any specific sales figure. Reading those three as a snapshot of demand, rather than a scorecard, is the more accurate posture.
The wishlist numbers deserve a note of their own. Wishlists are Steam's bookmark-for-later mechanic, and they are widely treated as a leading indicator of a launch; once pre-orders are open, they keep converting into pre-orders and week-one sales. Alinea's 1.6 million is its own count, and the only official figure on record is the one-million milestone — a gap of several hundred thousand with no official confirmation either way.
The money figure invites a sanity check. At the US Standard Edition price of $59.99, 300,000 copies corresponds to roughly $18 million in storefront-side spending; Alinea's $14.5 million sits below that, which is consistent with a net-of-platform-cut reading, or with a mix of regional pricing and Deluxe Edition share pointing the other way. Both readings are plausible, and that is exactly the point: without an official figure, the same estimate supports several defensible interpretations, none of which should be treated as settled.
There is also a growth data point that can be checked against the record: 15 days after Steam wishlists opened in mid-December 2025, S-Game announced the one-million mark, with the announcement landing at the end of that month. From one million on the official count (late December 2025, before the delay was announced) to Alinea's 1.6-million-plus estimate (late August 2026, well after it), both endpoints have clear sources; the curve between them has never been published by anyone. If you want firmer numbers going forward, two things are worth watching: a sales-milestone announcement in the studio's usual style, and Steam's public concurrent-player count during launch week — both far harder to spin than a pre-order estimate.
What the studio has said
On August 17, five days into the pre-order window, Liang posted a thank-you message to players on Chinese social media. Pre-orders, he wrote, had been live for five days and the performance had far exceeded the team's expectations; he called it a vote of confidence from players and promised that S-GAME would spare no effort to deliver a genuinely excellent game. He disclosed no figures.
That is the only official characterization so far, and its information lives in the direction, not the magnitude. "Exceeded expectations" means the pre-order curve outran whatever internal targets the studio had set — it says nothing about where that bar actually was, and outsiders have no way to judge. Read alongside the chart data, though, two independent sources now point the same way: this is very likely the strongest commercial opening S-GAME has ever had. Its earlier Rainblood games were far smaller independent productions, and the Phantom Blade mobile titles belong to a different product line. Given the studio's history, the tone of the message fits too: the June delay was also announced through a signed open letter from Liang rather than a bare notice, and this thank-you message continues that same habit of talking to players directly.
How to read these numbers
Start with what the record does establish. This is S-Game's first high-budget premium release for PC and consoles, with no existing player base to convert by default. Topping Steam's weekly chart during the pre-order window, keeping wishlists at a high level, and earning a front-page showcase on the US PlayStation Store are three independent signals pointing the same way: the game now has a very high commercial floor heading into launch. For a title that went gold before release and has no further public testing windows, that floor also removes some of the uncertainty around launch week on October 29.
There is a contrast here that is easy to miss: this pre-order surge happened after a delay. The usual worry is that moving a date erodes trust and pushes fence-sitters into wait-and-see. The trackable numbers suggest the opposite happened — wishlists grew from the official one million counted before the delay was announced to an estimated 1.6 million-plus by late August, and pre-orders put the game on top of a weekly chart in their very first week. On the evidence available, the delay did not cool demand; players appear to have simply re-anchored to October 29.
Zoom out, and the record has an industry position as well. The two titles Alinea benchmarks against — Black Myth: Wukong and Wuchang: Fallen Feathers — along with Phantom Blade Zero, are the standouts in a wave of Chinese single-player action games that has built real global traction over the past two years: the first proved how high the ceiling goes, while the other two test whether the market can consistently produce headliners. A pre-order curve that lands in the same range as both predecessors at the same stage — roughly 73 percent of Wukong's, and clearly ahead of Wuchang's — is good news for S-Game, and for the category.
Two boundaries still need to hold. First, an estimate is not a statistic. The 300,000 copies and the $14.5 million are model outputs with an unknown margin of error, and Alinea's method has not been published in full; if S-Game ever publishes official numbers, those become the reference. Second, pre-orders measure expectation, not quality. They prove, in aggregate, that a great many people were willing to pay before playing. Day-one performance, long-term content, and word of mouth still have to be earned in reviews and on live hardware — which is precisely what the June delay was meant to protect.
As for whether to pre-order, and when to buy: the sales record is not an argument by itself. The item-by-item differences between the Standard and Digital Deluxe editions, and what the pre-order bonuses are actually worth, are laid out in our pre-order guide; whether it is worth waiting for a physical collector's item is covered in our physical copy explainer; and per-platform unlock times are collected in our release date article. Those are decision questions, and they deserve to be kept separate from market heat.
Figures and chart positions in this article were compiled on September 6, 2026, and are labeled with their dates. Charts and third-party estimates change over time; official figures from S-Game take precedence when available.