Elden Ring has huge Steam success despite anger over stuttering on PC
Elden Ring has been a long time coming, and now it's here From Software's latest masterpiece has all but taken over the gaming world.
It's official; Elden Ring is FromSoft's biggest Steam launch to date. The latest game from the iconic studio has attracted over 750,000 concurrent Steam players – despite increasingly negative user reviews generating around the game thanks to its dubious PC performance.
Publisher Bandai Namco has yet to announce the game’s official launch sales (it's going to be easily above 1,000,000 at launch if the PC numbers alone are anything to go by), but we've seen a massive success just from Steam alone, at this point.
On launch day, Elden Ring hit a peak concurrent player count on Steam of a whopping 764,835 players, per SteamDB. When you consider that Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice has an all-time peak of 125,315 players, and Dark Souls 3 has 129,975 players, you can see just how heady these numbers are on PC.
Will Elden Ring become the sixth Steam game to attract over 1,000,000 concurrents over the weekend? We'll have to wait and see, but it seems possible.
But it's not all good news. The game has attracted a swathe of negative reviews on Steam thanks to its performance on PC. According to Digital Foundry, Elden Ring's performance is a bit of a "mixed bag" right now, and that's putting it lightly.
For PC users, even with the 1.02 patch available, there are stutters of up to 250 milliseconds in length when "new effects, enemies, and areas appear on screen."
The stutter lessens as the game goes on, but a "second and more pervasive stutter" appears to be tied to loading new game areas as moving from one area to the next can cause minor one-off frame drops. At its worst, there are "tumbling frame-time issues" that drop the frame-rate from 60 into the 40s.
And a cursory look at the Steam reviews (over 7000 of which are negative) shows that these performance issues are not lost on PC players. Still, it's not bad enough to keep over half a million people from playing the game at the time of writing this article.
If you want to know more about The Lands Between, you can check out our Elden Ring review here, investigate what all the critics are asaying about the game here, and look at the game's first big set of patch notes here.
If you're jumping into the game and want to know how to not die immidiately, check out our Elden Ring Beginner's Guide. We also have dedicated pages on Elden Ring Tips, Elden Ring's best class, which Keepsake to choose, how to craft, and more.
Elden Ring is available now on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, Xbox One, and PC.