The past month has seen a couple of significant launches. First, Lost Ark hit second place on the all-time Steam chart with over 1.3 million players. Now, Elden Ring has claimed sixth place, with the best numbers in FromSoftware’s catalog at 953,426 players.
Elden Ring’s launch on February 25th was a delayed one, but it’s clear that the anticipation and word of mouth have successfully driven numbers for the game. According to SteamDB, the initial launch numbers hit 745,653 on launch day, but allowing for fluctuations, the game continued to climb, hitting the peak on Saturday. As of this writing, the numbers sit at over 617k players in game right now on an average Monday a full week post-launch.
With near-universal acclaim in review scores and lots of good word of mouth for the game, it wasn’t really in doubt whether a new FromSoftware game would find its audience, but the numbers really show that there is not just an audience, but that word of mouth and abundant streaming is only helping. Hidetaka Miyazaki has been quoted in an interview that he believes that more people will ultimately finish Elden Ring than some of the company’s prior titles, and that the open world and ability to pace yourself through the content are likely factors.
However, these numbers are significant because not only have people been plunging into the mysterious (and with a reputation for being ultra challenging) FromSoft title, but the numbers grew over the week and are still robust. For comparison FromSoftware’s last new release, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, which launched back in 2019, had its peak at 125,315 players.
Where things go from here still remains to be seen, but Elden Ring is clearly off to an impressive start. We’ll have our own reflections on the game here soon.
(And should you be looking for an MMORPG with an active Steam community, you should take a look atour list of the top 5 most active MMOs you can check out.)
