In its first 60 days of release, Elden Ring became one of YouTube’s biggest ever gaming launches, seeing well over 3 billion combined video views.
In stats shared exclusively with IGN, Elden Ring saw 3.4 billion views in the two months after launch, dwarfing the next name on the list, GTA 5 on 1.9 billion. Of course, YouTube has grown since GTA’s launch in 2013, making that something of an unfair comparison – but the far more recent Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) saw 1.4 billion, so it’s clear quite how successful Elden Ring has been.
YouTube Gaming stops short of calling it the biggest gaming launch ever, but it’s clear that FromSoftware’s open world masterpiece has set an incredibly high bar for games on YouTube in the future. In large part, that’s down to the hunger for different kinds of video about the game, from Let’s plays, to guides, to lore explainers.
Elden Ring’s YouTube infographic. (Image credit: YouTube Gaming)
YouTube Gaming also provided a list of other stats around the biggest launch videos for Elden Ring:
Most Viewed launch videos:
Channels with the most Elden Ring launch views:
Content Type Breakdown:
- VOD – 71.3%
- Livestreams – 25.98%
- Shorts – 2.72%
Uploads By Bosses (descending order)
- Margit, The Fell Omen
- Malenia Blade of Miquella
- Godrick the Grafted
- Starscourge Radahn
- Draconic Tree Sentinel
Uploads by Character Class (descending order)
- Samurai
- hero
- Wretch
- astrologer
- Warrior
YouTube Gaming also called out some of the Elden Ring community’s best-known creators with ‘Elden Lord Awards’:
Finally, the team also acknowledged perhaps Elden Ring’s best-known hero, Let Me Solo Her – the player who took on the game’s hardest boss more than a thousand times, and earned a real-life sword for their efforts. According to YouTube Gaming, videos featuring Let Me Solo Her have accrued over 25 million views alone.
All of this is yet more proof of Elden Ring’s status as a true gaming phenomenon. It quickly became one of the fastest-selling games in recent history in both the US and Europe, one of Steam’s most played games by concurrent players, and one of the best reviewed games in modern history.
We called it a masterpiece in our 10/10 review, saying it “can easily be held amongst the best open-world games I’ve ever played. Like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild before it, Elden Ring is one that we’ll be looking back on as a game that moved a genre forward.”
Joe Skrebels is IGN’s Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to [email protected].