Elden Ring nears a million concurrent players on Steam, placing 6th all-time
The free-to-play Lost Ark had a lower peak player count today.
If video games have anything like box office charts, it's starting to be concurrent player counts. Elden Ring is the latest to set record numbers, with the latest From Software release rocketing to more than 950,000 players in the second weekend after release. It peaked at 953,426 concurrent players, according to SteamDB.
While that doesn't give a good estimation of total owners, it's likely this means the game has sold several million copies on PC alone—we won't even mention consoles. That's in addition to being one of the best-reviewed games ever. We gave it a 90 in our review.
If that's the case, perhaps the PC has now made enough money that someone at FromSoftware could take notice of the technical issues plaguing the game, or maybe even consider deigning to touch upon Elden Ring's shameful and downright half-assed mouse and keyboard controls.
Record-setting releases have only grown more common in the past few years as Steam's user base has grown to new heights. In roughly the last two years Valheim, New World, Cyberpunk 2077, and Lost Ark have all broken into the top 10.
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Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.