With the launch of theShadow of the Erdtreeexpansion, Bandai Namco is hoping it willbring in a lot of newElden Ringplayersand bump up the game’s already impressive sales. It’s too early to tell whether it has met the publisher’s expectations but, at the very least,Shadow of the Erdtreehas got more people playingElden Ringon Steam.
According toSteamDB, there were just over 240,000 concurrentElden Ringplayers at 9 p.m. UTC on June 20, which would’ve been an hour beforeShadow of the Erdtree‘s PC launch in U.S. Once the DLC was available worldwide, that number almost doubled to more than 495,000 players and, at around June 21, 2 a.m. UTC, peaked at 589,948 players.
While nowhere near as high as its all-time peak player count of 953,426 concurrent players, 589,948 is still more than half that number and the bestElden Ringhas performed on Steam in two years. There’s unfortunately no way of checking if the player counts on PlayStation and Xbox are similar but, if they are, this looks to be a very strong showing forShadow of the Erdtree. What’s more, at the time of writing,Elden Ringhas shot up to becomeSteam’s third most-played gamewith 467,135 concurrent players. The only two games outperforming it areCounter-Strike 2andviral sensationBanana.
It may seem baffling that a game that only involves clicking a banana over and over is proving more popular than a massive DLC expansion to 2022’s Game of the Year winner, but it does make some sense. For starters,Bananais completely free to play, not to mention much easier thanElden Ring. Last I checked,Bananadoesn’t have extremely challenging boss fights. Plus, the bananas you earn fromBananacan be sold for real money although this has invitedaccusations of the game being a scam of some kind.
Hopefully, Bandai Namco won’t be too bothered that a basic clicker game has more players thanElden Ringon PC right now. Although it’s not as ifElden Ringneeds to be more successful; even before the DLC launched, it had sold over 25 million copies worldwide according to theFromSoftware Twitter account. Despite such sales,Shadow of the Erdtreeis intended to be the only DLC expansion for the game, meaning FromSoftware’s next project will be something else entirely… though I’m sureElden Ring 2could happen eventually.
