Elden Ring is absolutely dominating gaming right now—my Twitter timeline is flooded with it, the PC Gamer office ends up talking about bosses and strategies at least once a day, and damn near all of my MMO pals have buggered off to the Lands Between. It's been doing incredibly well, and FromSoftware has just announced that the game has sold 12 million copies in the three weeks since its release.
To put that in context, as industry analyst Daniel Ahmad pointed out, the Dark Souls series as a whole didn't even hit 12 million copies sold until after the release of Dark Souls 3. For Elden Ring to do in three weeks what the Dark Souls series took three entire games to do is pretty staggering, albeit well-deserved.
In a press release from Bandai Namco and FromSoftware, the publisher and developer revealed that one million of those sales were in Japan, with the other 11 million being across the rest of the world. "It's astonishing to see just how many people have been playing Elden Ring," creator Hidetaka Miyazaki wrote. "I'd like to extend our heartfelt thanks on behalf of the entire development team."
Bandai Namco president Yasuo Miyakawa added: "Much effort was placed into creating Elden Ring so that we could exceed the expectations of our fans worldwide. In like manner, we will continue our efforts in expanding the brand beyond the game itself, and into everyone's daily life."
Elden Ring feels like one of the first games in a while where the hype has translated into both strong sales and critical acclaim—the game scooped up a ton of perfect scores and our own Tyler Colp sang its praises. "The Souls games are excellent, so despite reusing much of what we've seen before, it all works," he wrote in his Elden Ring review. "Where Elden Ring retreads the past, it's like playing a new, remixed and remastered version of a Souls game—with some frustrating technical problems to really replicate those old times. And when Elden Ring reaches for something more, it soars."
