Plus: Witness the Elden Ring-ness!

This industry analysis examines the commercial performance and market trends of PC and console gaming for late February 2022. The primary focus is the massive launch of Elden Ring, which achieved a peak of 764,000 concurrent users on Steam immediately following its debut. Despite this commercial success, the title faced a 59% positive review rating on Steam due to technical hurdles involving DirectX 12 and frame-rate stuttering on PC ports. Projections suggest the title will reach 10 to 20 million unit sales long-term across all platforms.

The scope of the analysis extends to subscription services and secondary platforms. Data from Apple Arcade indicates a strategic shift toward "plus" titles—ports of existing mobile hits like Solitaire and Mahjong—which dominate the monthly most-reviewed charts. While these evergreen, casual titles increase the service's broad appeal, they have reportedly reduced the average monthly usage-based payouts for developers of platform-exclusive games due to their high replayability.

On the console front, the report tracks the steady performance of Horizon: Forbidden West and the Cyberpunk 2077 next-gen update on PlayStation, while noting that the Xbox paid charts remain relatively static as the ecosystem shifts toward Game Pass. In the PC market beyond Steam, Sifu continues to lead the Epic Games Store grossing charts. Methodology relies on proprietary GameDiscoverCo Plus back-end data, SteamDB concurrent user counts, and public eShop and PlayStation Store rankings to gauge regional and global momentum.