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.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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