It’s been nearly eight months since Elden Ring was released. At its peak, it reached nearly a million concurrent users on Steam. Those are heights that are not seen by non-MM….O? games. Currently, there are roughly 25,000 concurrent users on Steam, which seems pretty damn good to me.
In comparison, the latest Platinum Game, Babylon’s Falls (their ill-fated attempt to do a live-service game once reached an all-time low of 0 concurrent players on Steam. They will shut down for good on the last day of February next year. When the shutdown was announced, they were getting 2 or 3 concurrent players 2 or 3. Not 2 or 3 thousand–they didn’t even get that much on release. They had 700 concurrent players when they released the game on Steam on the last day of February this year.
I recently looked up where Elden Ring sat on the concurrent players list. They are 39th, which is not bad for a game that is a live-service game. Yes, it’s open world. Yes, you can play it endlessly. But there is a finite amount of content in the game. There are not daily or even weekly added questlines that you can do.
I remember when I got waaaaay into Monster World. Near the end-game, I would check in every day, do the daily quests so I could get my rewards. It was a dopamine hit that was a steady drip over the days. When I finally stopped playing the game and went back to do the Geralt quest, it felt really strange. I did not like being back in, and I did just the minimum needed to get the weapon and armor, then fell off the game again.