In brief: With a player count peaking at close to a million Steam users, Elden Ring can already be called a success within the PC gaming community. At the moment, it's listed as the 6th most played game according to SteamDB.
Elden Ring has earned an average critic score of 96 on OpenCritic, but opinions about the game are further reflected in the sheer number of Steam users playing it. Reviews on Steam are not quite as favorable, with 84 percent of reviews being positive. A skim through the reviews reveals some players are not happy with the PC performance issues present in the game.
At launch, the action RPG peaked at almost 800,000 concurrent players but since then, that number has increased to over 950,000. Compared to Dark Souls III or Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Elden Ring amassed over seven times more players than each of these games had during its peak.
With these numbers, Elden Ring has already beat extremely popular titles like New World, Valheim, Fallout 4, Terraria, and GTA V. Still, there are still a few above it, including:
- PUBG: Battlegrounds - 3,257,248
- Lost Ark - 1,325,305
- Counter-Strike: Global Offensive - 1,308,963
- Dota 2 - 1,295,114
- Cyberpunk 2077 - 1,054,388
Moreover, the game is estimated to have sold over 10 million digital PC copies since its launch. If we add the PlayStation and Xbox numbers to the equation, total sales of over 20 million copies wouldn't be that far-fetched.
Put another way, Elden Ring is the biggest non-FIFA or Call of Duty launch since Red Dead Redemption 2 in the UK.