After several years of anticipation, fans of FromSoftware will finally be able to get their hands on Elden Ring. While the game is set to launch on the 25th, Elden Ring is already available to purchase on Steam and has already managed to achieve an impressive milestone. In a matter of hours, Elden Ring managed to accrue hundreds of thousands of concurrent players.
Of the many games in ongoing development over the years, Elden Ring is one that many in the gaming community have been looking forward to. Not only because FromSoftware is the development studio behind Elden Ring, but also due to the fact that the game's world and story were written in collaboration with George R.R. Martin, the author of the Game of Thrones series. Thus, there were ample reasons for a number of players to be interested in Elden Ring, but what's truly impressive is just how many people began playing the game after it launched.
Elden Ring was made available to purchase on PC much earlier than on console platforms, and within the first hour of the game going live on Steam, there were well over six-hundred thousand concurrent users playing Elden Ring. In just twenty minutes of Elden Ring going live on Steam, the game had a little under two-hundred thousand users playing the game.
In retrospect, it makes a lot of sense for Elden Ring to have such a high player base already. The anticipation for this game has been percolating since 2019 and for the longest time, no new information regarding Elden Ring was revealed until two years afterward. The excitement surrounding Elden Ring got to the point where an entire game development studio gave its employees a day off just so they could play Elden Ring.
It's amazing to see just how well players have responded to Elden Ring, despite its decently long development cycle and a release delay. If games like Cyberpunk 2077 have taught the gaming community anything, it's that game development is a meticulous process that takes a lot of time and effort. Therefore, hiccups in game development that cause delays will hopefully be understood better by the community in the years to come.
In any case, it will be interesting to see what the future holds for Elden Ring going forward. While the Dark Souls series is known to release paid DLC some time after the launch of any given game, it's unclear if that will be the case for Elden Ring. Then again, Bloodborne received DLC and much like Elden Ring, it's a game that's separate from the Souls series.
Elden Ring releases on February 25 for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
Source: PCGames