I don't want to jump the gun, but I'm beginning to suspect that people are getting pretty into the "Shadow of the Eldestree" business. The official Twitter account of the Elden Ring has thanked Tarnished around the world for purchasing over 5 million copies of the DLC in less than a week of its release. Michele must be happy to have received so much attention.

Five million copies is a huge number for those counting at home. For many games, five million sales is an incredible success that can be achieved throughout their entire lifespan on the market. For the expansion, Shadow of the Eldest Trees, to achieve that in less than a week is quite wild, to say the least.

By comparison, in November 2023, CD Projekt Red announced that since its release in September, Cyberpunk 2077's famous Phantom Liberty DLC had sold 4.3 million copies. This means that Shadow of the Erdtree has outsold Phantom Liberty by less than one-eighth in two months.

Regarding the success of Phantom Liberty in 2023, Obsidian design director Josh Sawyer tweeted that the 20% install rate for the cyberpunk DLC (the percentage of players who purchased both the base game and the DLC) was commendable. According to Sawyer, Obsidian's goal is to have an attachment rate of around 25% for DLC "released within a few months" of the base game, and Cyberpunk's 20% is an impressive number after two years of player interest wandering elsewhere.

What about Elden Ring's attachment rate? Well, in early June, From Software tweeted that more than 25 million units of Elden Rings had been shipped. In the first week. Without Idris Elba. The mind boggles.

While we celebrate FromSoftware's latest smash hit, let's consider another important metric. The "Scadutree Pronunciation Ratio," or the number of players who noticed that the "sc" bit is pronounced like "sh." ("Scadutree Pronunciation Ratio," i.e., the number of players who noticed that the "scadtree" bit is pronounced like "sh. It's Old English.