Today, publisher Bandai Namco and developer FromSoftware proudly announced that the Elden Ring expansion Shadow of the Erdtree has sold five million copies in its first three days of release. That’s an excellent result, to say the least. As a reminder, the base game had sold 20 million units in its first year and 25 million units as of this month.
Despite the mixed Steam user reviews, which bemoaned performance issues and excessive difficulty, the overall response of the community on the first and only DLC for 2022’s Game of the Year has been excellent. Shadow of the Erdtree also got fantastic scores, including from Wccftech’s Francesco De Meo, who awarded the expansion a 10/10:
It did not take long to get back into the engaging adventuring loop of the Elden Ring experience, searching for map fragments to get a better look at the map, placing markers where points of interest are seemingly located, and getting amazed by beautiful vistas, immense castles, and sprawling haunting forests, unaware of the dangers that lurked inside of them. With open-world fatigue setting in earlier this year due to the many open-world games released in 2024—like Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Rise of the Ronin, and the PC versions of Horizon Forbidden West and Ghost of Tsushima—Shadow of the Erdtree’s open-world design stands out as a testament to how the Elden Ring experience still surpasses anything else on the market. As such, I believe a perfect score is justified, even with the evident lack of significant innovation and some technical hiccups.
FromSoftware is also still working on improving the expansion post-launch. A calibration update was just released, and the developers have also confirmed more Shadow of the Erdtree balance tweaks and bug fixes are on the way for a future update. We’ll let you know once it goes live, of course.
