The rating of the Elden Ring expansion on Steam dropped to “mixed” due to high difficulty, the creators of Second Wave announced the imminent closure of their studio, and the number of players in Microsoft Flight Simulator exceeded 15 million. Here is what happened in the gaming industry over the weekend.
Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree
- The Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree expansion launched on Steam with a “very positive” rating but shortly after, its reviews became “mixed.” At the time of writing, it has 31.4 thousand reviews, of which only 64% are positive. According to the comments, players are primarily unhappy with the expansion’s excessive difficulty—they complained about bosses with massive health pools and generally poor game balance. Many also noted optimization issues. However, this did not stop users from actively playing. According to SteamDB, Elden Ring’s peak online player count on Steam during the weekend reached 781.2 thousand.
- The South Korean studio Challengers Games announced that the launch of its two games, Second Wave and iLLANG, was a financial failure. The studio had been operating at a loss for a long time in hopes of a breakthrough (in particular, its employees had not received wages since March), but expectations were not met. As a result, by June, it had completely run out of funds, and its total debt had grown to 2.4 billion won ($1.7 million). In light of everything that happened, Challengers Games decided to close down. The servers for its games are set to shut down on June 25, and shortly after, the studio itself will close its doors.
- The creators of Microsoft Flight Simulator announced that 15 million people have tried the flight simulator. It took just under four years to reach this milestone. Microsoft Flight Simulator was released on August 18, 2020, on PC and Xbox.