Nightreign Blows Up Steam Hours After Launch

FromSoftware’s latest drop, Elden Ring: Night Reign, went live on Steam and instantly ignited. Within two hours, over 300,000 people were already online, smashing into the top five most-played games. That’s not quite the legendary numbers Elden Ring pulled back in 2022, but considering Night Reign is technically a spinoff with roguelite mechanics and online co-op instead of open-world solo discovery, it’s still a huge deal.

The launch kicked off on May 30, with peak Steam traffic hitting just over 313,000. That puts it directly behind Dota 2 and well ahead of most multiplayer games that drop in mid-year. More importantly, it shot straight past Helldivers 2, Rust, and Apex Legends in the same window. Right now, Night Reign is the most played non-live-service title on Steam. No microtransaction hooks, no seasonal drip feed—just a standalone ARPG with coop baked in.

The Steam data comes from SteamDB, showing the surge hit at 313,593 peak players an hour and forty minutes after the game unlocked. Not bad for a title that was framed as a smaller-scale, replay-heavy follow-up. Of course, Night Reign doesn’t carry the same hype ceiling as Elden Ring itself, which launched with close to a million concurrent users. But Bandai Namco never pitched this as a full sequel. It’s not trying to outdo its predecessor, just carve out something new.

Image: SteamDB.info

It’s currently the fourth most-played game on Steam.

And that’s without even factoring in PlayStation or Xbox. Those stores update their top sellers more slowly, so no solid read yet on how console sales compare. But Steam might already be enough to call this a win. Based on how early reviews are stacking, Night Reign has over 6,300 user reviews on Steam just nine hours in. According to GameDiscoverCo’s 2025 report, that kind of volume usually maps to 2–2.5 million copies sold, assuming the usual concurrent-to-sales ratio.

That would make Night Reign one of the fastest-selling PC games this year—and an immediate success for a spinoff that launched with minimal marketing, a single Game Awards teaser, and a clear “this isn’t Elden Ring 2” message. It even dropped on a Friday with no cross-promo event, no deluxe editions grabbing headlines, and no pre-launch access schemes. Just wishlists, word-of-mouth, and people still chasing the high of the Lands Between.

Performance-wise, Night Reign might still trail its predecessor, but the player base isn’t treating it like a second-tier project. FromSoftware took the Dark Souls DNA and stitched it into a co-op-friendly, semi-randomised map structure. That gamble seems to be paying off, especially with Steam Deck owners hungry for something fresh but familiar.

Here’s how Night Reign stacks up on Steam right now:

It’s worth noting the review score is currently “Mixed”—only about 64.5% positive so far—but that’s typical for big-name games on launch day. Performance issues, expectations from Elden Ring fans, and bugs in multiplayer usually take time to settle. If FromSoftware patches quickly, that score could swing.

Official sales data hasn’t been released yet, but Bandai Namco usually shares early sales milestones once numbers start looking impressive. If the 2.4 million estimate holds, we’ll likely see confirmation before next week.

For now, Night Reign has done exactly what it needed to do: get people back into the loop of dodging, rolling, and dying gloriously. It’s the first real test of whether the Elden Ring brand can stretch into new forms—and so far, it looks like the answer is yes.