Phantom Blade Zero Tops Steam Sales as S-Game Credits Its Team

Phantom Blade Zero has arrived with a major Steam debut: it’s the platform’s global top seller, and its concurrent player count has passed 500,000 within hours. For S-Game director Liang, known as Soulframe, that response reflects years of work by a team willing to rebuild or discard material they had already spent months refining. He says he’s “deeply grateful” for their understanding and support.

Ken Allsop is the source article’s news writer. The original review awarded the game a perfect score and called it “a new action RPG gold standard”; its assessment is available here.

A wuxia world with roots in a student project

Liang’s starting point was far smaller than the game now topping Steam’s sales charts. As a student, he made Rainblood: Town of Death in RPG Maker. The project laid the groundwork for a fantasy setting shaped by traditional Chinese wuxia, then expanded with ideas such as body modification and parallel worlds.

“Making games had simply been a source of comfort while I studied abroad,” Liang says of that early period. He didn’t know where the hobby would lead, but it became central to his life. Three years before this launch, Phantom Blade Zero made its major debut at a PlayStation Showcase. Following the strong response, S-Game set aside its other projects to focus its efforts on the action game.

That history helps explain the scale of the finished release and the intensity Liang describes. He says game development isn’t always a rational pursuit: passion and “a little madness,” in his words, can shape a game’s character. For him, that spirit had to come from the whole studio.

Action with room to recover

Phantom Blade Zero may bring to mind Dark Souls and Elden Ring, but Liang describes a more forgiving approach to its toughest encounters. Large bosses can have multiple stages, yet checkpoints help players resume a fight without repeating every step from the beginning. The aim, he says, was to make a game that fans of wuxia and elaborate action could enjoy, whether they want a demanding fight or a chance to relax.

That wider reach doesn’t mean removing the challenge. Liang wants players to feel powerful because of what they do in combat: each slash, block, dodge and execution should make victory feel earned. Enemies need to feel dangerous too, he argues, so overcoming them carries weight. “No matter what enemy stands before you, you will defeat them in the end,” he says, while making clear that the path to that win still asks players to engage with the combat.

A global Steam response and a team effort

The Steam response extends beyond China. The game is also at the top of the sales charts in regions including the United States and the United Kingdom. Its concurrent player count crossed half a million in its opening hours and was still rising at the time of the report, with the weekend ahead offering room for further growth.

Liang points to the team’s willingness to revisit difficult decisions as a defining part of development. At times, he asked colleagues to take apart polished work, rebuild it or abandon it altogether. That could also mean letting go of content that had taken substantial time and effort. He says technical skill mattered, but so did a particular kind of persistence and obsession.

He also singles out the contributions of two creative leads. Art Director Michael Chang drew the concept art for every character and most environments. Music Director Caisheng Bo created more than ten hours of music, handling nearly all of its composition, performance and mixing, as well as guiding how it was implemented in the game. Liang says several major battles came from younger team members in their twenties.

PC settings, display support and the driver tip

Feedback from hands-on previews and show-floor demos led to several options intended to give players more control. Audio settings let players adjust the tone of clashing blades, while PC control remapping offers flexibility over inputs. The game also supports a broad range of screen formats, from 16:9 monitors and TVs and 16:10 laptops and handhelds to ultrawide displays with ratios beyond 3:1.

Liang flags a potential performance issue for players using Nvidia’s 621.01 driver, which he says can cause instability. He recommends version 617.42 for now and expects another driver update soon. The day-one patch improves ray tracing and path tracing performance, but players on less powerful hardware can turn those features off. S-Game says it refined the game’s standard rendered visuals to preserve the intended look without ray tracing, and tested on mid-range and lower-end PCs as well as handhelds.

Price and what the launch says about the game

Phantom Blade Zero is out now for $59.99 / £49.99 on Steam. Liang frames the release as the large-scale result of a student project and the work of a studio whose members share a love of games. The strongest early signal is both commercial and social: players are turning up across multiple regions, while the game’s checkpoints, adjustable controls and PC display options broaden how they can approach it.

Its next test is whether that opening momentum holds as more players settle into Soul’s adventure. The launch figures are already substantial; the game’s mix of high-impact combat and recovery points gives that audience a clear invitation to keep going.

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Related links: Liang on PlayStation executives’ first reaction; Phantom Blade Zero coverage; PC RPG recommendations; Liang’s player tips; and a boss guide.