Fans can't seem to get enough of Elden Ring at the moment, as the game has amassed a huge yet loyal following. Elden Ring has become particularly popular on Steam where it surpassed its own concurrent peak player count around 2 weeks after its launch, which is uncommon in the gaming industry.
The game's success is hardly surprising at this point, as Elden Ring is one of the highest-rated games ever made. The game is currently sitting 15th on Metacritic's list of the best games ever released with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild narrowly beating it out. This is an exceptionally notable accolade for FromSoftware, as the company's first Souls game, Demon's Souls was somewhat of a niche title with a cult following, whereas Elden Ring has garnered respect and admiration from the industry at large.
The industry-wide praise the game received culminated in Elden Ring having over 600,000 concurrent players on Steam only an hour after its launch. Most other games experience a drop-off in players once they have reached their initial peak player counts within a week of release, however, this was not the case for Elden Ring, as the game's player count has continued to rise since its release.
This led to Elden Ring having the sixth-highest concurrent player count on Steam ever. Elden Ring had a player count of 953,426 over the weekend, which surpassed the previous sixth place game, New World, by a reasonably sizable margin. It is uncertain as to whether or not Elden Ring will surpass Cyberpunk 2077's exceptionally high peak of 1,054,388 players, as most story-focused games lose players as time goes on.
Steam was not the only platform where the game excelled, as Elden Ring was also able to triple Dark Souls 3's peak Twitch viewer count on the day of its release. Dark Souls 3 had a peak Twitch viewer count of 276,000 viewers while Elden Ring soared past this number by having 890,000 viewers on the day of its release.
Despite all of the praise the game received, Elden Ring had a mixed review score on Steam owing to its performance issues at launch. Thankfully, Bandai Namco attended to the vast majority of these issues, which improved the game's reception rating on Steam to "Very Positive" with 84% of reviewers on the platform now giving the game a positive rating at the time of this writing.
Elden Ring is available now on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.