The Surprising Success of Elden Ring

By: Alex Larson

On February 25th FromSoftware released the latest game in their Dark Souls series. The game is well on its way to be a historic landmark in gaming. The Dark Souls series has always benefited from relatively good success. Continuous iterations on a well thought out gameplay loop have resulted in a small but dedicated audience that is always eager to see more. But Elden Ring represents something more. Its breakthrough sales represent small studios breaking into the AAA studio scale.

More and more people have become fed up with the AAA formula and Elden Ring is a break from the mold. Over the past few years Call of Duty has not been selling as well as it used to. Combined with the flop of Battlefield 2042 you start to wonder what the large studios have been doing wrong.

In contrast, Elden Ring has become the best selling game in february. Only a few months after its release it is the second best selling game in a twelve month period.

It is easy to theorize possible reasons for this trend. It could be the increasing amount of micro-transactions and other ways to pull money out of consumers. It could be that new games are coming out a mess. It could just be that Elden Ring is a well designed game. Whatever it is, it leads to an interesting trend in data towards small studios.