Elden Ring Nightreign player count surges to more than 300,000 players in just 60 minutes, eclipsing the entire Dark Souls trilogy combined

Update: The Elden Ring Nightreign player count has since climbed to more than 306,000 players, and seems to still be on the rise.

The Elden Ring: Nightreign player count has already surged to more than 250,000 players on Steam alone, just 30 minutes after launch.

As noted in our Elden Ring Nightreign live coverage, Steam Charts listed the Elden Ring Nightreign player count as 255,867 at around 23:30 BST - almost exactly 30 minutes after launch.

To put that in perspective, that's more than a quarter of Elden Ring's all-time peak of 953,000 players. It's also, according to my quick maths, more than the peaks of Dark Souls 2, 3, and Remastered combined, which come out around 225,000 concurrents.

Clearly, Nightreign has something of a leg-up here. If nothing else, being a multiplayer game offers a serious boost to concurrent player counts, by encouraging multiple people to be playing together at the same time. That said, it's a game that reviewed worse than its predecessor, which is the kind of thing that can drive down sales, and is in a weirder genre mash-up, which can also deter fans, at least to begin with.

Our Elden Ring Nightreign review alluded to that idea, and while early user reviews on Steam are positive, they do also note that Nightreign is an altogether different beast than Elden Ring. With that in mind, it'll be very interesting to see where Nightreign eventually lands - but with console launches not yet available in much of North America, and a very late-in-the-day release time to contend with, it'll likely be several days until we get a firm answer.

If you're still not sure, here's our guide to the Elden Ring Nightreign release times.