Elden Ring Becomes Fastest-Selling Souls Game in UK History

Despite being highest-rated video game of all-time on OpenCritic and Metacritic, 2022 action role-playing game Elden Ring from developer From Software and publisher Bandai Namco gets review-bombed on Steam by unhappy players.

Only three days after release, Elden Ring reportedly becomes fastest-selling "Souls-like" game in UK boxed sales charts for this week, which breaks launch week sales record of previous Souls games and doesn't include digital sale numbers.

Without including digital download, Elden Ring beats boxed launch sales number of Dark Souls by 26%. It also became third biggest retail release of this year, only behind last week's Horizon Forbidden West and Pokémon Legends: Arceus.

According to Gamesindustry.biz, Soulsborne genre sales are on a decline in UK since Dark Souls III release. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice sold half of DS3 and 30% of Bloodborne, while Demon's Souls Remake only made half of what Sekiro did.

Digital sales data will be arriving later this week and digital download numbers have increased considerably since 2016. For instance, overall sales of Horizon Zero Dawn was around 22% but half of Forbidden West sales number are digital.

Steam concurrent player count offers you an idea of Elden Ring digital sales number this week, raking up about 900,000 players at launch and therefore, exceeding Dark Souls 3's highest ever concurrent players number by seven times over.

With launch of Elden Ring, last week's PlayStation-exclusive Horizon Forbidden West sees 79% drop in week-on-week sales figure. Nintendo Switch-exclusive Pokémon Legends: Arceus have dropped a bit on chart yet sales increased by 5%.

Elden Ring boxed sales were 3% on PC, 17% on PlayStation 4, 63% on PlayStation 5 and 17% on Xbox consoles. Considering both PC and Xbox are largely digital focused platforms, majority of physical copies were sold on PS4 and 5 consoles.