Elden Ring Nightreign has a killer first day on Steam, but reviews are surprisingly mixed

The moment many FromSoftware fans have been waiting for has arrived. Elden Ring Nightreign, the studio’s experimental, multiplayer-only off-shoot is here, having launched worldwide overnight.

Nightreign is a special release for the storied Japanese studio in a number of ways, and it’s clear players showed up for it, regardless of how unusual of a game it is from that team.

On Steam, where Elden Ring Nightreign currently tops Steam’s top sellers chart, the game has launched to a large and dedicated audience, causing it to land a spot in the platform’s highly-competitive top five most played games.

That’s the result of its concurrent player count, which is the metric the most played games list is based on. Nightreign peaked at 313,593 concurrent players very quickly after it went live (via SteamDB), and it has over 150,000 players in-game at the time of this writing.

This is a pretty respectable turnout for any game, and it certainly makes Nightreign one of 2025’s best-performing games on Steam. Considering the game’s launch time on Thursday/Friday, there’s every chance more players will jump in at the weekend, pushing these figures even higher.

Obviously, we have little insight into how well it may be doing on consoles, but it’s very likely as successful there, too. As big as this day-one turnout is, it’s nowhere close to Elden Ring’s all-time peak of 953,426 players. Nobody expected Nightreign to beat – or even match – that colossal peak concurrent, but it is worth keeping in mind nonetheless.

Even setting aside the game that spawned it, Nightreign’s Steam peak concurrent is already among FromSoftware’s highest, well above titles like Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, and any of the Dark Souls games.

Much like professional critics, however, player sentiment is also divided on the game. As things stand, 67% of 7,481 Steam user reviews are positive, which is why it’s currently sitting at a Mixed overall rating.

Believe it or not, Elden Ring itself started out pretty wobbly on the Steam review scale at its respective launch, too. Ironically, many of the same complaints about performance issues and stuttering that were common then have reemerged now. That said, Nightreign’s unique situation as a co-op-only game has created its own set of grievances, some of which have to do with the studio’s decisions surrounding the game and not necessarily its technical state.

Reviews will likely settle as the days go by and move that rating to Positive. Until then, if you’re one of the millions jumping into the not-Lands Between, our Elden Ring Nightreign guide is live and ever-growing. We recently updated it with new builds for Ironeye and Raider.