Elden Ring player count has exploded on Steam thanks to the DLC… but it still can’t catch up with Banana

With the launch of the Shadow of the Erdtree expansion, Bandai Namco is hoping it will bring in a lot of new Elden Ring players and bump up the game’s already impressive sales. It’s too early to tell whether it has met the publisher’s expectations but, at the very least, Shadow of the Erdtree has got more people playing Elden Ring on Steam.

According to SteamDB, there were just over 240,000 concurrent Elden Ring players at 9 p.m. UTC on June 20, which would’ve been an hour before Shadow of the Erdtree‘s PC launch in U.S. Once the DLC was available worldwide, that number almost doubled to more than 495,000 players and, at around June 21, 2 a.m. UTC, peaked at 589,948 players.

While nowhere near as high as its all-time peak player count of 953,426 concurrent players, 589,948 is still more than half that number and the best Elden Ring has performed on Steam in two years. There’s unfortunately no way of checking if the player counts on PlayStation and Xbox are similar but, if they are, this looks to be a very strong showing for Shadow of the Erdtree. What’s more, at the time of writing, Elden Ring has shot up to become Steam’s third most-played game with 467,135 concurrent players. The only two games outperforming it are Counter-Strike 2 and viral sensation Banana.

It may seem baffling that a game that only involves clicking a banana over and over is proving more popular than a massive DLC expansion to 2022’s Game of the Year winner, but it does make some sense. For starters, Banana is completely free to play, not to mention much easier than Elden Ring. Last I checked, Banana doesn’t have extremely challenging boss fights. Plus, the bananas you earn from Banana can be sold for real money although this has invited accusations of the game being a scam of some kind.

Hopefully, Bandai Namco won’t be too bothered that a basic clicker game has more players than Elden Ring on PC right now. Although it’s not as if Elden Ring needs to be more successful; even before the DLC launched, it had sold over 25 million copies worldwide according to the FromSoftware Twitter account. Despite such sales, Shadow of the Erdtree is intended to be the only DLC expansion for the game, meaning FromSoftware’s next project will be something else entirely… though I’m sure Elden Ring 2 could happen eventually.