Photo: Screenshot of the game published on Steam

One hour after being launched on Steam, the galaxy-themed online game "Dyson Sphere Program," made by a game company in Southwest China's Chongqing Municipality, rushed to the top of the best sales chart on the platform, stunning gamers around the globe.

Five days after its debut on Friday, 96 percent of the more than 4,300 reviews of the game have been positive.

"Warning: This game will eat your time. There were so many moments I wanted to exit then the sun rose and I saw what I had made, then played for at least 2 or 3 more hours," one player commented on Steam.

The game has players build factories around the galaxy and combines that with a background of a Dyson planet. The developers set many small and periodical goals in the game so not only sci-fi fans, but also ordinary players can understand the rules.

Many players built factories overnight on the night of release, filling their entire planet with resource harvesting factories.

A long-time user of Steam surnamed Xiao told the Global Times on Tuesday that she had bought and played the game.

"The visual and audio in the game are great. I am not very familiar with science fiction but it generated my interest in the genre," she said.

"The game made me connect it to The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin and other brilliant Chinese science fiction works. Don't know why, but science fiction works have become a part of Chinese culture that can lead the world," another Chinese netizen commented.

China's sci-fi industry has been rapidly developing in recent years, with its output value in 2019 reaching 65.87 billion yuan ($9.84 billion), up 44.3 percent compared with that of 2018, the Xinhua News Agency reported. 

According to the China Science Fiction Conference held in Beijing, sci-fi games contributed to the industry most with an annual output value of more than 43 billion yuan.