FromSoftware’s Elden Ring has been out for less than a day, and it’s already taken over Twitch and Steam. The open world action-RPG is posting unprecedented numbers for a Souls-like.
Shortly after its midnight launch, Elden Ring was already the most played game on Valve’s storefront with over 760,000 concurrent players. That dwarfs player counts for prior FromSoftware games, including Dark Souls Remastered, DSII, and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Dark Souls III, the developer’s previously most-played game on Steam, topped out at 129,000 concurrents.
As Niko Partners senior analyst Daniel Ahmad pointed out, Elden Ring has also been crushing it on Twitch with 910,000 peak concurrent viewers. That’s almost four times the previous peaks for Dark Souls III and Sekiro. This puts it well on its way to being the game with the second-highest peak viewership for February, right behind Smilegate’s Diablo-style MMO, Lost Ark. Cyberpunk 2077 and Grand Theft Auto V’s all-time peaks were 1.14 million.
Hype for Elden Ring has been building for a while, ever since director Hidetaka Miyazaki revealed that Game of Thrones creator George R. R. Martin would assist with writing some of the game’s backstory. Initial reviews of Elden Ring also turned out to be glowing, with some critics already naming it a frontrunner for their game of the year. It currently sits near the top of the list of highest-rated games on review aggregator sites OpenCritic and Metacritic.
Elden Ring’s early record breaking numbers are notable for a few reasons. First, it’s a long and predominantly single-player RPG hailing from a notoriously newcomer-unfriendly subgenre. While some reviews have called the game FromSoftware’s most approachable yet, it’s also more than happy to kill you within the first couple minutes of playing. Second, it’s coming out in a packed month that’s included Dying Light 2, Destiny 2: The Witch Queen, and Horizon: Forbidden West. Plus, Elden Ring’s massive launch on Steam comes even as its performance on PC remains far from ideal.
It’s too early to tell if Elden Ring will set new records over the weekend, but its immediate success is an interesting rebuke of some other games in the open world genre, that seem to play it safe in the hopes of reaching a larger audience. Apparently it doesn’t matter that you can’t track quests or pause the game in Elden Ring, at least for now.