When it comes to video games, while it’s always nice to be a critical darling, the sales are absolutely what’s most important. That’s what developers and publishers use to determine if there should be a sequel, or a spinoff, or something else to expand the game’s franchise or universe. The money isn’t half bad either. A key thing here is that when a major AAA title releases, it’s not about whether it’ll hit 1 million units sold, but how many millions of units it will sell. For Elden Ring, the answer is many, many, millions.
A new sales report from Bandai Namco has been released, and in it, it was revealed that Elden Ring has shipped about 16.6 million units. Now, to be clear, “shipped’ doesn’t mean sold–however, you don’t get to ship that many units around the world if people aren’t buying them. While the sales might not be there just yet, it’s no doubt very, very close.
This obviously makes the title a major hit across many different platforms, as it came out on the current and last gen Xbox and Sony systems, as well as the PC. It’s also one of the best-selling games of the year, if not the best-selling game of the year so far–there are one or two titles that might be close to it and we don’t have the numbers for them quite yet.
This also helps cement the game as one of the best of the year in terms of quality. 17 million people don’t buy a game if it’s not good, and that’s why so many are saying that this might be the Game of the Year at present. It’s hard to argue with that given the critical and fan praise.
What really makes this so special in terms of how well it’s doing is that this title is the culmination of everything that FromSoftware has been building toward and learning from ever since they started to hit their stride with Dark Souls. Bloodborne, Sekiro Shadows Die Twice, and others helped the developer grow and make even grander and somehow even more brutal in terms of difficulty. Elden Ring advanced because of all of them, not the least of which was because of the open world that they did for the first time ever.
The question now is what’s next? Well, it’d be foolish to think that some really good DLC wouldn’t come for the title, and while we can’t guarantee a direct sequel, you can bet they’re already pondering away on what to design and build next.
Source: Twitter
