Elden Ring looks likely to have smashed Souls sales records in the UK

Elden Ring has likely smashed series launch records in the UK.

Physical-only sales data published by GI.biz has confirmed that the From Software title comfortably outsold the previous biggest ‘Souls’ boxed launch, 2016’s Dark Souls 3, by 26%.

Those figures don’t include digital sales data, and the download games market has increased significantly since 2016. For example, half of Horizon: Forbidden West’s sales were digital, compared to around 22% for the 2017 original.

Digital sales data is expected later this week, but in terms of physical Elden Ring is the third biggest retail launch of the year in the UK, according to the Gfk data, behind Pokémon Legends: Arceus and last week’s Horizon: Forbidden West.

As noted by GI’s Christopher Dring, Souls-like genre sales had been declining at UK retail since Dark Souls III.

“Sekiro did half of what DS3 did (and 30% of what Bloodborne managed). While Demon’s Souls (Remake) did half of what Sekiro did. Elden Ring looks set to end all that and take the genre to new heights,” he wrote.

Steam figures offered a picture of how Elden Ring performed in terms of global, digital audiences this weekend, topping nearly 900,000 concurrent players on the PC platform.

That’s nearly seven times more than Dark Souls III’s highest ever concurrent player count (129,975).

Having received near-universal praise from critics, Elden Ring is already sitting near the top of some ‘best game of all time’ lists.

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Elden Ring is officially one of the best reviewed games ever

Following the publication of reviews, the FromSoftware title has topped aggregation sites

Based on 116 reviews at the time of writing, Elden Ring is the second-highest-rated title ever on OpenCritic with a ‘Top Critic Average’ of 96 – an achievement matched only by The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Red Dead Redemption 2 and Grand Theft Auto V (all of which currently hold a slightly lower true average score).

And on review aggregation site Metacritic, at the time of publishing Elden Ring has scores of 97 (PS5) and 95 (PC and Xbox Series X/S).

VGC’s Elden Ring review called it From Software’s most vital game since Demon’s Souls.