Has Elden Ring Nightreign Already Peaked? What the Player Numbers Reveal
Launched May 30, 2025 with sky-high ambitions, Elden Ring Nightreign surged past 70,000 daily Steam players — but since mid-July its ranks have thinned, and the slide is getting harder to ignore.
Nightreign showed up in late May looking like a sure thing: a co-op spin-off wearing Elden Ring gear with bigger boss fights and actual first-party multiplayer. It popped out of the gate, then... cooled off. Not a collapse, but definitely a plateau. The fix? FromSoftware already has it sitting in the chamber: DLC.
So, is Elden Ring Nightreign actually fading?
Short answer: it is not falling off a cliff, but the momentum is wobbling.
FromSoftware clearly hoped Nightreign would ride the wave of 2022's Elden Ring. It is not a direct sequel, more of a co-op detour that reuses familiar assets, blows up the boss spectacle, and bakes in multiplayer support from the studio itself. That pitch worked at launch. Then the numbers started drifting.
- Launch: May 30, 2025
- First month on Steam (per SteamDB): 100k+ players, healthy and steady
- Before mid-July: holding 70,000+ daily active players
- July: fluctuations between 80k and 50k, then a late-month spike back over 100k
- August: swings between 90k and 40k
- Early September: one last peak around 105k
- Since then: hovering at 40,000+ daily actives for the past two months
That last line is the story. Forty-thousand a day is not bad, but for a game positioned as the co-op extension of one of the biggest releases of the decade, it is a stall. The studio did try to keep the fire going early with in-game beats like the Everdark Sovereign event, but the cadence has slowed, and there is only so much players can do without fresh stuff to chase.
Why now is the right moment for DLC
This is exactly the window where an expansion can flip the curve. When your audience is stable-but-drifting, new content is the easiest way to wake everyone up at once: lapsed players reinstall, current players get a jolt of purpose, and the conversation spins back up.
FromSoftware is not known for fast-turnaround add-ons. Case in point: Elden Ring got its Shadow of the Erdtree expansion roughly two years after the 2022 launch. The good news for Nightreign: a DLC is already on the studio's slate for release before the end of 2025. That lines up neatly with where the player counts are right now.
In the meantime, the team recently rolled out Deep of Night mode. It is a nice holdover, but it is also a reminder that the big swing is still the expansion. When that lands and opens up more of Limveld, that is the moment this thing gets a second wind.
Bottom line: the floor is solid, the ceiling is waiting, and the fastest way to reach it is to drop the DLC while the audience is still warm.