Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition opened at No. 5 in the UK boxed charts and was gone from the top 40 a week later. In that same week the plain old base game sat at No. 25, four and a half years after launch. That’s the more interesting story.
The spike was real while it lasted. In the UK, the Switch 2 version entered at No. 5 in its launch week, finishing above Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream and Mario Kart World. That’s a good result for a full-price release on a game-key card. In Japan it did even better against the rest of the field. It came in second on the weekly chart with 27,604 physical copies, and only Rhythm Heaven Groove, at 34,688, outsold it that week.
A Launch Week Spike, Then Gravity
Then the numbers dropped hard. A week after launch, the Tarnished Edition had fallen out of the UK top 40 completely, and the Switch 2 version looked like it had already reached the people who were waiting for it.
Japan followed the same curve. In its second week the Tarnished Edition sold 6,559 copies and placed sixth. By mid-September it was down to 1,617 copies a week and 18th place.
So yes, the new edition put Elden Ring back in the headlines for a week.
The Base Game That Won’t Leave
During the Tarnished Edition’s launch week, the regular game was sitting at No. 15 in the UK, down from No. 11 the week before. A week later, when the Switch 2 version fell out, the original was still in the chart at No. 25.
That’s normal for this game. Go back through the weekly UK charts and it keeps turning up:
- At the end of 2024, after a couple of weeks outside the top 40, it jumped back in at sixth place.
- In April 2025 it slipped from 15th to 17th.
- In June 2026 it was at No. 32, with Nightreign right behind at No. 34.
- In July 2026 it came back into the chart at 19th, then climbed from 19th to 16th and dropped to 18th over the following weeks.
- One September week, with the Switch 2 hype over, it went from No. 40 to No. 23.
Keep in mind that the UK chart counts boxed copies only. Digital sales aren’t in there at all, so the chart shows you the trend, not the totals. Even so, a 2022 game keeps selling well enough to stay in the same list as this week’s new releases.
Elden Ring had already shipped 20 million units by February 2023, about a year after launch. Bandai Namco’s announcement for the Tarnished Edition launch still gives the figure as more than 30 million units, so that’s the latest official number. On top of that, Shadow of the Erdtree has passed 10 million and Nightreign has passed 5 million.
Steam Says the Same Thing
Elden Ring’s all-time concurrent peak on Steam is 952,523. That’s the launch crowd of 2022. In September, the first full month after the Tarnished Pack came out, the game averaged 30,840 concurrent players, up from 28,638 in August. October slid back to 23,455, about 2.5% of the launch peak.
For a game in its fifth year, that’s still a big crowd.
The Horse Armor Grumbling
Not everyone liked the new content. On PlayStation, Xbox and PC, the Tarnished Edition extras arrive as the Tarnished Pack. Switch 2 owners get it all in the box, but everyone else has to buy the classes, armor, weapons, Torrent attire and invasion events as a paid add-on.
What you get for $4.99 on Steam in the US is two starting classes (Heavy Knight and Idus Knight), four armor sets, new weapons, three Torrent attires and two NPC invasion events. So if you’re on PC or console and want those two classes, you’ll have to pay for them.
Some players hated that. The pack’s Steam reviews dropped below 50%, which put it at Mixed. A few angry players took it out on the main game with reviews about paid “horse armor”, a jab at Bethesda’s infamous Oblivion DLC. The review bomb stayed small, and the main game’s recent reviews held on to Very Positive. If a game can get a cosmetics fight in its fifth year, people clearly still care about it.
What Happens When the Movie Hits
Now the big one. A24’s live-action Elden Ring, written and directed by Alex Garland, is filmed for IMAX and opens on March 3, 2028. It’s also the first A24 movie filmed for IMAX. The cast is led by names like Kit Connor, Ben Whishaw and Cailee Spaeny, and shooting started in the UK in April 2026. According to the Wall Street Journal the budget has reportedly climbed to nearly $200 million, close to three times what A24 spent on Marty Supreme, its previous most expensive film.
Other adaptations show what can happen to an older game when its movie or show comes out.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie, April 2023. In the UK week after release, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe rose to second place with sales up 9%, Super Mario Odyssey jumped from 10th to 5th with a 15% increase, and New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe came back into the top 10. Mario Strikers: Battle League Football more than doubled its sales and returned at No. 30. Nintendo’s president later told investors that the movie had a positive effect on sales of Mario titles. And it happened again this spring, when the new Super Mario movie lifted Super Mario Galaxy + Super Mario Galaxy 2 from 23rd to 12th in the UK.
A Minecraft Movie, April 2025. Switch sales of Minecraft rose 25% in the week before the film opened, and another 8% after it released. Those are smaller jumps, but they come on top of a game that was already selling in huge numbers.
TV shows have produced even bigger bumps:
- Fallout: after the Prime Video series, Fallout 4 sales in Europe jumped by more than 7,500% compared with the week before, taking it to No. 1. That jump came with steep discounts on the whole series running at the same time, so not all of it was the show.
- The Last of Us: after the HBO premiere, UK boxed sales of The Last of Us Part I rose 238% week-on-week, and the PS4 Remastered version rose 322%.
In every one of these cases, older games in the series moved up the charts when the adaptation came out, and the size of the bump depended on the adaptation, the price and the timing. A weekly TV series stays in the conversation for two months, while a film gets a big opening weekend and then fades. Whether Garland’s movie does for Elden Ring what Mario did for Nintendo depends on whether people go see it.
Five Years in 2027, Six by the Movie
Elden Ring turns five on February 25, 2027. When the movie opens a year later, the game will be just over six years old. That’s not unusually old for this kind of bump. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe was six when the Mario movie lifted it, and Fallout 4 had been out since 2015 when the show sent it to No. 1 in Europe.
So when Elden Ring shows up in a weekly chart next to this week’s new releases, it isn’t a comeback. It’s been in those charts almost the whole time.
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