Phantom Blade Zero Is Already One of Steam’s Highest-Grossing Games Two Months Before Release

Phantom Blade Zero is still more than two months away from release, yet S-GAME’s wuxia action RPG has already climbed to #7 on Steam’s worldwide revenue chart. That puts an unreleased game above dozens of titles people can actually play today. After watching the new State of Play, going back through earlier gameplay demos and comparing what S-GAME is promising with what players who have tried it are saying, I finally understand why people are spending money this early. The sword fighting looks phenomenal. My bigger question is whether the world around it can be just as good.

Phantom Blade Zero has climbed Steam’s global revenue chart months before release. Image: S-GAME / PlayStation

There is something unusual sitting near the top of Steam right now. SteamDB’s live worldwide revenue ranking currently has Phantom Blade Zero at #7 overall, behind Steam hardware, several free-to-play giants, Mortal Shell II and the heavily discounted Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5+2.5 ReMIX. Strip away the free games and hardware, and Phantom Blade Zero is currently the third-highest-ranked traditional paid game on the chart, despite not being released until October. It is above Big Walk, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, Helldivers 2 and Black Myth: Wukong at the time of writing.

That does not tell us exactly how many copies have been preordered. Steam does not publish a preorder total here, and S-GAME has not announced one. I would rather leave that number unknown than turn a chart position into a fake million-copy headline. What the ranking does tell us is simpler: people are already spending serious money on this game before reviews exist.

S-GAME opened preorders on August 11 and used the announcement to reveal that development is complete. The official account also released an extended trailer before Sony followed it with an entire State of Play dedicated to the game.

Official S-GAME preorder post on X:

The State of Play finally convinced me this combat is real

Watch the full gameplay deep dive:

I have been suspicious of Phantom Blade Zero since its first big reveal, mostly because it looked almost too smooth. Soul would deflect a strike, move through an enemy’s guard, change direction halfway through the exchange and answer with another attack without the animation ever looking awkward. It was beautiful, but beautiful combat trailers are easy to make when somebody carefully chooses the thirty best seconds from hours of footage.

The longer demonstrations have changed my mind. Phantom Blade Zero still looks choreographed, but now it looks choreographed because the combat system is built to create that rhythm, not because somebody edited all the mistakes out. Attacks flow into defensive moves, defensive moves become counters, weapons change the distance of an encounter and Soul seems able to move through fights rather than constantly stopping after every animation.

S-GAME has been very open about what it wants. The studio has talked about taking inspiration from the speed and elegance of kung-fu cinema rather than simply reproducing the slower rhythm associated with many Soulslikes. The developers have also used handcrafted animation extensively to get the exact movement they want.

The speed and flowing movement have been part of Phantom Blade Zero’s identity since its earliest gameplay reveals.

That is the key difference for me. Fast combat by itself is not impressive anymore. The interesting part is readability. Even when Phantom Blade Zero gets ridiculously quick, I can usually tell what happened: one fighter attacked, the other responded, the spacing changed, someone overcommitted and the advantage flipped.

Players watching the new showcase are reacting to the same thing. In the main r/PS5 discussion, one person wrote:

“Looks sick as hell, need that demo though.”

Another praised the world, animation, movement and weapon variety, while others called it one of the strongest showings the game has had so far.

That first comment is probably closest to where I am. The State of Play convinced me the combat exists in the form S-GAME has been advertising. I would still love to get my hands on a demo before pretending I know exactly how it feels.

This older gameplay trailer is worth watching again

Gameplay trailer:

Watching the older footage after the new State of Play is interesting because the combat has stayed remarkably consistent. The dramatic parries and martial-arts movement were not ideas that disappeared once actual production caught up with the trailer. Hands-on reports from people who played earlier demos have also repeatedly said the original footage represented the real combat rather than a disguised sequence of quick-time events.

Phantom Blade Zero has always leaned heavily into martial-arts cinema rather than conventional medieval fantasy. Image: S-GAME / PlayStation

I also think the constant Sekiro comparison is becoming less useful. There is obviously shared DNA. Both games care about deflection, timing, dangerous duels and reading an opponent. The difference is in what they want you to feel. Sekiro often makes precision feel disciplined and controlled. Phantom Blade Zero seems to want the player to become increasingly expressive, eventually turning a fight into something that could pass for the climax of a martial-arts movie.

That does not automatically make it better. It does make it more interesting than another game simply trying to recreate FromSoftware.

The world may matter more than the fighting

My biggest concern has never really been whether Phantom Blade Zero could produce a spectacular boss fight. We have seen enough of those. The question was what happens during the twenty minutes before the boss arrives.

The State of Play finally spent real time answering that. The Wulin contains villages, valleys, hidden areas, unusual machinery, characters offering side quests and routes that can reveal additional pieces of the story. S-GAME says some side quests can even open different story paths. The developers are also avoiding the huge continuous open-world model, preferring connected handcrafted regions instead.

The latest showcase revealed much more exploration than previous Phantom Blade Zero trailers. Image: S-GAME / PlayStation

That sounds much better to me than another 100-hour map covered in icons. Phantom Blade Zero does not need endless countryside. It needs places worth remembering. A game with combat this tightly designed would gain very little from asking me to spend fifteen minutes travelling between every interesting encounter.

Recent coverage of the State of Play says the world is organized around eight hand-painted Chinese ink-wash maps, with regions linking into a larger interconnected structure. Locations shown include villages, valleys, lakes, abandoned industrial spaces and stranger areas filled with machinery and puppets.

That part excites me almost as much as the sword fighting. If S-GAME can build a world where you remember how one path connects to another, where revisiting an area reveals something new and where optional fights are actually worth finding, Phantom Blade Zero becomes far more than a boss showcase.

The environments are just as important as the combat if Phantom Blade Zero wants to hold players for an entire campaign.

Sony clearly knows this is the question people are asking too. The newest presentation focused much more heavily on the world, characters and gameplay systems instead of simply showing another two-minute boss montage.

PlayStation post on X:

Fifty-five weapons could either be amazing or completely pointless

S-GAME says the full game contains more than 30 main weapons plus 25 secondary weapons called Phantom Edges. Weapons can be upgraded, combined with accessories and switched without permanently wasting upgrade materials because reforging lets you recover resources and reinvest them elsewhere. Summons and ranged tools also expand the number of ways players can approach combat.

That number initially worried me. Games love advertising huge arsenals where most of the weapons are basically the same object with different statistics. Phantom Blade Zero has a chance to avoid that because its weapons seem connected to actual martial-arts styles. Range changes, movement changes and attack patterns appear to change along with the weapon.

This is where I think the game could become genuinely addictive. The best action games eventually stop being about finding the fastest possible way to kill something. Once you know you can win, you start looking for a better-looking way to win.

Devil May Cry has survived for years on that mentality. Nobody needs the absurd combos high-level DMC players perform. That is exactly why they are fun.

Phantom Blade Zero appears to understand the same idea.

Weapon variety will matter much more if each option genuinely changes how the player fights.

The question is whether all 55-plus tools actually support that kind of experimentation or whether players eventually discover three obviously superior weapons and ignore everything else. We will not know until people have spent a few weeks breaking the combat system apart.

For now, the variety looks promising.

The extended trailer shows more of the weapon system

Extended gameplay and preorder trailer:

This trailer sits somewhere between a cinematic preview and a full gameplay breakdown. It gives a better sense of Soul’s movement, combat variety and story while also introducing one of the biggest names attached to the project.

Donnie Yen is more than celebrity casting here

Donnie Yen has been working with S-GAME as a creative consultant while also performing Mó Yuan. Image: S-GAME / PlayStation

S-GAME revealed that Donnie Yen has served as a creative consultant on Phantom Blade Zero since 2023. He also provides facial and motion capture for Mó Yuan, Soul’s father, but his more interesting contribution is helping the studio think about kung-fu and action design.

That makes sense when you watch the fights. Yen has spent decades working in films where combat needs to be extremely fast without turning into visual noise. Good martial-arts choreography gives the audience enough information to understand why a move worked, even if the actors are moving faster than normal people realistically could.

Phantom Blade Zero has a similar quality at its best. The screen can be busy, but you can still see the exchange underneath it. Someone attacks, Soul responds, positioning changes, somebody makes a mistake and control of the fight shifts.

S-GAME also has another important connection to that world through action director Kenji Tanigaki, a longtime collaborator with Yen. The studio has talked about recreating martial-arts movements through handcrafted animation when conventional motion capture could not produce exactly what the team wanted.

That gives the game’s strange “Kungfupunk” label more credibility than I expected. S-GAME uses the term for its mixture of wuxia, traditional Chinese imagery, machinery, occult elements and a more aggressive modern attitude. It sounded like marketing jargon when I first heard it. After seeing the Wulin properly, I get it.

It does not look like another medieval European Soulslike with Chinese decorations placed over it. The architecture, clothing, weapons and movement are becoming part of the game’s identity.

More on the Wulin and martial-arts influence

This is much more useful here than throwing it into a list of videos at the bottom. It directly supports the martial-arts and world-building side of the story.

The difficulty system could be more interesting than it sounds

Phantom Blade Zero includes several difficulty options. Wayfarer is aimed more at players interested in the story, while Hellwalker promises a tougher experience with more advanced enemy behaviour. There is also a Sixty-Six Days mode aimed at experienced players looking for the hardest version of the game.

The part that interests me is the promise of changing enemy behaviour. Increasing difficulty by giving an enemy twice as much health is boring. Making that enemy more aggressive, giving it different responses or changing how it reacts to the player is much more interesting.

Players picked up on that immediately. Some of the discussion around the showcase focused specifically on Hellwalker because S-GAME seems to be promising more than a simple damage multiplier.

I am cautious about that wording because “advanced AI” can mean almost anything before release. It might genuinely change how enemies respond to the player, or it might simply mean they dodge a little more often. We need the finished game before knowing how meaningful it is.

Still, I like the idea. Difficulty becomes far more interesting when enemies become smarter instead of simply becoming harder to kill.

Calling it a Soulslike is starting to miss the point

The Soulslike comparison is probably never going away. Phantom Blade Zero has difficult bosses, deflections, dangerous enemies, interconnected exploration and a combat system where timing matters. Of course people are going to mention Sekiro, Dark Souls and Elden Ring.

I just do not think the label explains the game particularly well anymore.

A traditional Souls game spends a lot of time making you feel vulnerable. The tension comes from entering hostile places where enemies can kill you quickly and mistakes have consequences. Phantom Blade Zero certainly has dangerous enemies, but Soul himself is presented very differently. He looks like somebody the enemies should also be afraid of.

That changes the fantasy. You are not simply surviving a powerful opponent. The goal seems to be reaching a point where the duel starts looking like the final scene of a martial-arts movie.

S-GAME has pushed back against the Soulslike label too, preferring to talk about Phantom Blade Zero as a wuxia action game. I understand that more after watching the latest footage. The developers clearly learned from games such as Sekiro. Almost every modern third-person action RPG has learned something from FromSoftware. That does not mean every game with a parry button has to spend the rest of its life being described as another Soulslike.

Phantom Blade Zero finally looks like it has enough personality to escape that comparison.

Players are impressed, but the missing demo has become part of the conversation

There is an important difference between excitement and blind hype, and Phantom Blade Zero’s community still has plenty of the former without completely falling into the latter.

The immediate reaction to the State of Play was strongly positive. One r/PS5 user called it one of the best showings they had seen for a game in a while, while another said it was the strongest Phantom Blade Zero presentation so far, specifically praising the world, movement, animation and weapon variety.

But there is another question appearing constantly:

Where is the demo?

A separate community discussion after the presentation quickly filled with people asking exactly that. S-GAME has taken playable builds to gaming events before, so many players expected the latest presentation to end with a public demo announcement.

It did not.

I actually think a demo would be one of the smartest things S-GAME could release. Phantom Blade Zero is almost uniquely suited to one because the biggest selling point is not something a developer can fully explain through screenshots.

It is how the combat feels.

Give people one area, several weapons and one serious boss. If the fighting is genuinely as good as it looks, a demo could probably sell more copies than another trailer.

The Steam chart proves this has moved beyond normal hype

This is the part that turns Phantom Blade Zero from an interesting preview into a genuine gaming business story.

At the time of writing, SteamDB has Phantom Blade Zero at #7 worldwide by revenue, despite the game not being available yet. It is one of the highest-ranked traditional paid games on the entire store right now.

That is very different from getting millions of trailer views.

Watching a trailer is free. Wishlisting is free. Arguing about whether something looks better than Sekiro on Reddit is free.

Preordering is not.

S-GAME has spent several years gradually removing reasons to doubt the project. The first trailers established the look. Later demonstrations showed more bosses and weapons. Event attendees played the combat and confirmed that the outrageous trailers were not hiding a completely different game. Sony has now given S-GAME enough time to show exploration, builds, difficulty settings, side quests and a much larger part of the Wulin.

The result is that some players have started paying before the reviews arrive.

The quieter parts of the Wulin may ultimately matter just as much as Phantom Blade Zero’s spectacular duels. Image: S-GAME / PlayStation

There is still plenty of reason to be cautious. We have not seen how repetitive normal enemies become after twenty hours. We do not know whether 55 weapons create genuine variety or balance problems. We do not know whether the PC version launches cleanly, whether the story is actually worth following or whether the final areas receive the same attention as the material currently being shown in trailers.

I also think S-GAME has created a strange problem for itself. Phantom Blade Zero now looks so good that merely being “pretty good” might disappoint people. Every new trailer has pushed expectations higher. The animations need to feel good outside carefully selected encounters. The Wulin needs to reward exploration. The bosses need to keep surprising players after the tenth spectacular duel.

Still, I understand the preorders now.

A year ago, Phantom Blade Zero looked like an almost suspiciously perfect combat trailer attached to a game we knew very little about. Today it looks like a proper action RPG with a clear identity, a world that may actually be worth exploring and combat that people who have played it keep praising.

I would not call it one of 2026’s best games before anyone has reviewed the finished version.

I would call it one of the most interesting bets players are making right now.

Steam’s current revenue chart suggests a lot of people are already willing to make that bet.

What players are saying

“Looks sick as hell, need that demo though.”

“This is the best showing of this game that I’ve seen.”

“The world looks interesting with the Kungfupunk and the animation/movement looks incredible.”

“Rooting for them to live up to that.”

That is a pretty accurate picture of the mood around Phantom Blade Zero right now. People are excited, some are already paying for it, but there is still enough skepticism to make the October release genuinely interesting.

Have you seen enough to preorder it, or are you waiting for the demo and full reviews?