Chinese open-world RPG rockets to the top of Steam with over 170,000 concurrent players

Tale of Immortal
(Image credit: 鬼谷工作室)

Tale of Immortal (or 鬼谷八荒) is an Early Access sandbox sim that's only been out a week, but that hasn't stopped it from becoming one of the most popular games on Steam. Earlier today, concurrent players peaked at just over 172,000 people, making it the fifth most popular game on Steam—beating out Grand Theft Auto 5 and Rust. Players seem to really enjoy Tale of Immortal too, as it now has over 15,000 positive Steam user reviews, giving it an 86 percent positive rating. Not bad for an Early Access game that just launched a few days ago with Simplified Chinese as its only available language option.

If you're getting déjà vu reading this, it's because Chinese indie games have been blowing up on Steam with surprising regularity over the past few years. Charming life sim Chinese Parents and complex martial arts RPG The Scroll of Taiwu both topped Steam's global best seller list in 2018, with the latter quickly selling over 1 million copies in just a few months.

More recently, games like Bright Memory—a stunning FPS made by a single person that was featured during Microsoft's Xbox Series X showcase—Sands of Salzaar, Amazing Cultivation Simulator, and Gujian 3 have experienced similar success. Each one beat out notable big-budget releases to top Steam's best sellers list and has tens of thousands of positive user reviews.

This is fascinating.

Over the past few years, Steam has become a vital platform for Chinese PC gamers looking to sidestep China's rigorous and pervasive censorship of media and the internet. Though Steam theoretically shouldn't be available in China, it's remained unblocked (except for community features like the forums) and has become an extremely popular way to play uncensored games like PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. Steam now has over 30 million Chinese players, and Simplified Chinese is the second most common language setting for the Steam client according Steam's own hardware survey.

That Chinese PC gamers are flocking to Steam and buying complex sandbox games and singleplayer RPGs challenges the basic assumptions of the Chinese gaming industry. The belief that Chinese gamers only want to play free-to-play MMOs or ultra-competitive multiplayer games like League of Legends has prevailed for decades. And yet vibrant Chinese indie games continue to blow up on Steam and outperform many big-budget releases.

The success of Tale of Immortal also represents the growth new gaming genre that's been becoming more mainstream recently. Like Amazing Cultivation Simulator, which released late last year (and is now available in English), Tale of Immortal is a "cultivation sim" where players undergo a spiritual journey of divine ascension heavily inspired by Taoism. You start as a lowly human and, through meditation, discipline, and practice of martial arts, you eventually become a super-powered god.

In Tale of Immortal, judging by the trailers, this means exploring a tile-based 2D world, building up settlements and taking on quests, and kicking the crap out of any monsters or spirits that stand in your way.

As Khee-Hoon Chan explained in their excellent preview of The Witcher 3-style Chinese RPG Gujian 3, this is an extremely popular genre of fiction called Xianxia in China. It takes the breath-taking martial arts acrobatics of films like Red Cliff (which everyone should watch because it's amazing) and House of Flying Daggers, and transplants them into a fantasy world full of gods, monsters, and magic.

Though Tale of Immortal's reviews are promising, I'm hoping its developers also plan to add English localization so I can play it for myself. If you're able to read Simplified Chinese, you can find Tale of Immortal on Steam where it costs $20.

If you want to learn more about China's indie games, you can read my report on how they're fighting to survive amid Chinese government censorship and changing regulations. For a more general overview, check out our guide to PC gaming in China.

Steven Messner

With over 7 years of experience with in-depth feature reporting, Steven's mission is to chronicle the fascinating ways that games intersect our lives. Whether it's colossal in-game wars in an MMO, or long-haul truckers who turn to games to protect them from the loneliness of the open road, Steven tries to unearth PC gaming's greatest untold stories. His love of PC gaming started extremely early. Without money to spend, he spent an entire day watching the progress bar on a 25mb download of the Heroes of Might and Magic 2 demo that he then played for at least a hundred hours. It was a good demo.

Latest in Sim
PowerWash Simulator 2 screenshots
'More evolution than revolution': PowerWash Simulator 2 is coming late 2025, and it's bringing online multiplayer and split-screen co-op with it
A child stands on top of a dinosaur exhibit, hugging the nose of a dinosaur skull.
As a real life museum employee, I'm a bit confused by the amount of pirate ghosts in Two Point Museum—but it's not going to stop me trying to make the most realistic exhibits I can
A citizen of a city
A lot is going on for Cities: Skylines' 10th anniversary—from freebies to new creator packs—but there's still a big ol' elephant in the room
Staring eyes in a face covered in oil
Death Stranding 2's PS5 release date is in June, let's hope it doesn't take 8 months to hit PC this time
Cities: Skylines 2 screenshot - street level at night
Cities: Skylines 2's asset editor remains a distant dream: Colossal Order is still working on it but says it's 'proven more technically challenging than initially anticipated'
Town in Tales of Seikyu with two townsfolk sat on the stairs
Tales of Seikyu is just your regular farming simulator, apart from the fact I've got shapeshifting abilities and I'm engaged to a pretty persistent kappa
Latest in News
Erenshor - A player and two simulated MMO party members stand on a plateau in front of a yellow landscape
This RuneScape-looking 'simulated MMORPG' has all the nostalgia without the drama because all the other 'players' are NPCs
Pirate Bay co-founder Carl Lundstrom
Pirate Bay co-founder and far-right politician found dead after plane crash
Sunset in the desert in Hello Sunshine
Hello Sunshine is a desert survival sandbox where you live in the literal shadow of the colossus
Roblox CEO David Baszucki.
'Don't let your kids be on Roblox', Roblox CEO tells parents, before comparing himself to Walt Disney and declaring the platform 'the future of communication'
Titus in Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 3 reveal promo image
Praise be to the Omnissiah! Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 3 is officially in development
Jensen Huang, co-founder and chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., speaks while holding the company's new GeForce RTX 50 series graphics cards and a Thor Blackwell robotics processor during the 2025 CES event in Las Vegas, Nevada, US, on Monday, Jan. 6, 2025. Huang announced a raft of new chips, software and services, aiming to stay at the forefront of artificial intelligence computing. Photographer: Bridget Bennett/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Group allegedly trying to smuggle Nvidia Blackwell chips stare down bail set at over $1 million