FromSoftware’s Elden Ring is the studio’s best-selling game by far with a 136% increase in sales over Dark Souls 3. While sales are always a great indicator of financial success, the better proof of a game’s quality rests in how much time players spend with the game.
As it turns out, Elden Ring players are just built different compared to other fanbases. Not only is the game one of the best-selling games of the generation, a third of players have spent over 100 hours in the game. (This figures don’t include the just-released Nintendo Switch 2 version of the game.)
This comes from Alinea Analytics’ Rhys Elliot who revealed that the open-world FromSoftware game has sold 36.4 million copies across all platforms. Half of those sales were on Steam with 35% of sales on PlayStation, and 15% of players on Xbox.
While sales are interesting, what’s more interesting is that 26.9% of players, 9.8 million of the aforementioned 36.4 million, have spent over 100 hours within the world of Elden Ring across all platforms. Yes, this may not be surprising if you’re an Elden Ring hardcore player, but the vast majority of players do not spend this long in games they’ve bought.
For example, Baldur’s Gate 3, which has now sold 23.2 million copies across all platforms is another beloved game with a devout audience. However, only 50.1% of players have actually finished the game’s first act, according to Steam’s achievement tracking stats.
As per Alinea, 10.9% of Elden Ring’s players have grabbed every single achievement in the game on PlayStation. Additionally 10.5% of players on PC have every achievement on Steam, and 3.9% of Xbox players have grabbed every achievement as well. This means that 3.5 million players across the game’s 30.6 million players have 100%’d the game.
These figures outperform many linear, non-open world game, which is all the more surprising. With FromSoftware’s penchant for difficulty and the fact that it is a large-scale open world game, players are simply bursting to spend more time within its world.
These figures show just how popular Elden Ring truly is. A game’s long-standing popularity isn’t just reliant on sales, but how much people actually play it. To this day, FromSoftware’s open-world game has tens of thousands of concurrent players at all time, essentially the figures of a live-service game.
While stockholders have pushed from FromSoftware to spit out another game in the series, it’s not known if the studio is planning a numbered sequel. For now, FromSoft is working on The Duskbloods, a new PvPvE Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive game. Afterwards, maybe another open-world game is on the cards, we just don’t know.
