Elden Ring, the latest release from the fan-favourite studio FromSoftware, was released in early 2022 and has seen some minor updates to balancing and weapons since. On February 21, the Bandai Namco Europe YouTube channel went live as the game’s publishers presented the official gameplay trailer of Shadow of the Erdtree, the game’s first and likely only DLC.
The reveal was Bandai Namco Europe’s most popular livestream ever, garnering 687.8K Peak Viewers. The upcoming DLC was first teased a year ago, and fans cannot wait for new content and updates to the game after two years of gameplay since its release.
The broadcast announcing the upcoming DLC was rather short, lasting only 15 minutes, but the Japanese publisher’s stream was hugely watched for its short time. In only 15 minutes, the stream generated 109K Hours Watched thanks to 436.1K Average Viewers. Viewership for the reveal stream was consistently climbing as the broadcast continued until it finally reached its peak viewership.
| Stream date | Stream title | Peak Viewers |
|---|---|---|
| 21 Feb, 2024 | ELDEN RING Shadow of the Erdtree | Official Gameplay Reveal Trailer
|
687 835 PV |
| 19 Jan, 2024 | TEKKEN 8 - Red Bull Pindrop
|
5 699 PV |
| 28 Oct, 2023 | DRAGON BALL: THE BREAKERS – 1st Anniversary Special Live Stream
|
4 906 PV |
| 05 Mar, 2023 | [DBGBH2023 Day2] DRAGON BALL Games Battle Hour 2023
|
1 855 PV |
| 30 May, 2023 | DRAGON BALL: THE BREAKERS Season 3 Special Launch Live-Stream
|
582 PV |
The broadcast was the highest viewership a single Elden Ring channel has ever received before, and the watch time brought by this stream and other streamers covering the news was substantial enough to have a direct effect on the game’s watch time dynamics on Twitch.
Since the end of 2023, Elden Ring has roughly received around 200K Hours Watched on a daily basis. However, with the announcement of the DLC coming soon, viewership immediately rose to almost 600K HW. Interestingly, a lot of the most-watched channels around this time actually were not even covering the DLC.
Papaplatte and HandIofBlood recently began an Elden Ring Co-op run together. The two German broadcasters are hugely popular and have generated a large portion of Elden Ring’s daily watch time for this recent period. Pekora Ch. 兎田ぺこら, also one of the world’s most popular streamers, dipped her toes into some Elden Ring content, around the same time as popular American streamers willneff and CYR.
Some hardcore veterans of Twitch and Elden Ring did cover the DLC release to high viewership. Elajjaz is a Swedish content creator whose most popular content involves speedrunning games, largely those from FromSoftware. Elajjaz went live on February 2 to react to the new gameplay trailer, and he received 13.7K Peak Viewers, making the broadcast his most popular stream of 2024, so far.
Distortion2, another speedrunner turned content creator, also went live on February 21 to react to the new trailer, and he garnered 10.2K Peak Viewers, the latter receiving 1K viewers in a raid from another old-school Dark Souls speedrunner, lobosjr. Although this was not Distortions2’s most popular broadcast of 2024, it was quite close and fell within his top 3 most popular streams of the year.
In summary, in the week during the release of the new Elden Ring trailer, viewership was high for the FromSoftware title. Although a noticeable increase in viewership took place, the most watched streams of the period are simply gameplay from top streamers, rather than people covering the new DLC news. Nevertheless, the viewership for the official Bandai Namco announcement stream was more viewership than the game has seen since its release.
The recent viewership for the gameplay trailer on Bandai Namco Europe’s YouTube Live Channel is comparable with the viewership the game received on Twitch during its release week. On February 25, 2022, Elden Ring as an overall category received 909.8K Peak Viewers on Twitch. This remains the highest-ever peak viewership the game has received on Twitch, and in the following days after this, the viewership settled at around 500K PV.
The recent announcement stream was the first time that Elden Ring garnered more than 500K Peak Viewers since its release week. In fact, since April of 2022, the Elden Ring category on Twitch has been unable to reach more than 200K Peak Viewers.
Singleplayer games on Twitch and other live streaming platforms generally slowly lose viewership after release. Compared to multiplayer games, which usually offer higher replayability, singleplayer games slowly lose viewers as streamers complete the game or otherwise stop broadcasting gameplay of it. Elden Ring’s upcoming Shadow of the Erdtree DLC will revitalise the game’s viewership, and bring in a second wave of hype and excitement within the live streaming community.
This can already be observed in another popular title, Cyberpunk 2077. Since the release of the Phantom Liberty DLC, viewership for Cyberpunk has been much higher than before. In the 8 months of 2023 before the Phantom Liberty release, Cyberpunk 2077 generated 780 Average Viewers on Twitch every month, on average. Since the DLC release in late September of 2023, the game has received 6.4K Average Viewers on average every month.
The Shadow of the Erdtree DLC was revealed on YouTube Live to 687K Peak Viewers. Other live streamers covered the DLC’s release on their own channel, however, the most popular Elden Ring content on Twitch currently remains to be the gameplay and runs of top streamers. The release of the upcoming DLC should revitalise the game’s viewership, and help give it a boost back up, just as Cyberpunk 2077 enjoyed.
