Elden Ring won Game of the Year at the 2022 Game Awards on Thursday night, but the more interesting thing happened immediately afterwards. No, not the prankster who took the microphone at the very end to call out his rabbi Bill Clinton – FromSoftware led Hidetaka Miyazaki’s acceptance speech. After expressing his thanks, Miyazaki said, “As for Elden Ring, we still have some things we want to do, so receiving this GOTY award really encourages us.”
To me, those sound like three nice letters: DLC.
Elden Ring was the biggest game of 2022, but how big is it on a grand scale? It’s not GTA or Minecraft big. Still Dark Souls, the series that people couldn’t keep quiet about in the past decade, has sold a combined 33 million copies; Elden Ring has sold 17 million in just a few months.
Any other video game of its size released in 2022 would have been desperate to hold all that player attention with a drip of new quests and microtransactions. For example, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla had six “seasons” of post-release DLC, featuring everything from new hairstyles to new weapons to new regions and missions. But other than a few balance patches, Elden Ring has been a black box for nine months, from February 26 to December 6 – the surprise announcement of new arenas being added for PvP play.
That free PvP DLC is just an appetizer, though, and not the kind that you overeat and spoil dinner. It’s the kind that makes you realize how hungry you are. Not just hungry – starving. If and when FromSoftware announces a proper expansion for Elden Ring next year, the friendly single-player adventurers can lose themselves for another 10, 20 or 30 hours, 17 million players will get hungry for it.
Was the most-played, best-selling game of any given year in PC gaming history actually an expansion for an existing game? Because that could potentially happen in 2023. There’s really only one game standing in the way of Elden Ring: Starfield.
Elden Ring is big, but it might not be quite Fallout big. Bethesda’s Fallout 4 shipped 12 million units a day and probably passed 25 million a few years later. Presumably, the audience has only grown since then. Starfield had the potential to blow Fallout 4 out of the water; players are prepared for it to be the next big, bigger-than-they-maybe-imagine RPG. But Microsoft’s acquisition of Bethesda means Starfield won’t be coming to the PS5. That’s 25 million potential sales that went there (for the sake of simple math ignore how many people own a PS5 and an Xbox or gaming PC). Ars Technica has some helpful charts that break down Elden Ring’s early sales against other open world titans.
On PC alone, I expect Starfield to be the hottest new game of 2023, though it could have a close competitor. Diablo 4 looks like it’s going to succeed, and Diablo 3 sold 12 million copies in its first eight months (and that was back in 2012, when there were far fewer PC gamers). The rest of gaming’s best-known names coming into 2023 aren’t actually Elden Ring big, despite a longer history. Assassin’s Creed Valhalla reached 20 million players after two years, but that doesn’t equate to sales. Final Fantasy 16 is definitely going to be big, but the best-selling game in the entire series, Final Fantasy 7, has approx 24 years to sell as many copies as Elden Ring did in less than one. That is astounding to me.
If every Elden Ring player bought an expansion in 2023, they would outsell and maybe even beat every new game in the world except Starfield and Diablo 4. DLC sales don’t usually go that way, but it’s hard to make an educated prediction: DLC sales are ubiquitous, from just 5% of existing players in some cases to Euro Truck Simulator’s rare absurdly good sales . I’d expect Elden Ring to lean towards the absurdly good side, with at least 40% of players picking up a meaty expansion.
So what is FromSoftware up to and when can we expect it? Dark Souls’ first expansion, Artorias of the Abyss, came out 13 months later, while the second game’s trio of DLC add-ons were announced just three months after release and began landing soon after. For Dark Souls 3, publisher Bandai Namco announced a season pass for two DLC packs before the game even came out, though it took a little longer to arrive than Dark Souls 2’s.
There is no clear pattern to apply to Elden Ring. Will FromSoftware pepper 2023 with two or three minor expansions? Will Elden Ring get a single, major expansion like Artorias, released around its one-year anniversary, perhaps adding an entire region to the map? I think that’s more likely. Those smaller expansions feel to me like publisher Bandai Namco pushing for what was trendy at the time, but with Elden Ring I think FromSoftware has already been able to make its own decisions. One big expansion, a 2023 Game of the Year edition and you’re done: on to the next game.
As for what it will contain… some of the clues that dataminers found in Elden Ring were part of the recent free PvP update, but others pointed to more bosses and old dungeons, which isn’t exactly revealing. The most likely path seems to be a storyline focusing on Miquella, Malenia’s sibling, whose presence is strongly felt in Elden Ring but remains unexplored. Iron Pineapple has one pretty good guess.
Personally, I hope FromSoftware has been working on some performance updates to fix Elden Ring’s stuttering; DLSS and FSR support would be great too. But mostly I’m just excited to see how much bigger Elden Ring can get, both in terms of its already huge world and its cultural impact. A decade ago, game design nerds went nuts over how Dark Souls bucked the big budget design trends of its time, and from its surprise success came a wave of action RPGs that mimicked Dark Souls instead.
Now, in one year, 17 million people have seen that same lens applied to open world games. I’m expecting a story next year about the shocking number of players who have purchased and played Elden Ring’s DLC, and a story about how Elden Ring has changed this decade’s open-world games in four years’ time. That’s just in time for whatever major new project FromSoftware comes after Armored Core 6.
