When One Game Swallows a Franchise
Elden Ring was always going to be big. What nobody fully anticipated was how completely it would redirect the energy of an entire studio’s legacy – and how quietly that redirection would sideline the series that made FromSoftware’s name in the first place. Dark Souls, the trilogy that turned “Soulsborne” into a genre descriptor and built one of gaming’s most dedicated communities, is losing ground inside its own house. Not through failure, but through the gravitational pull of something larger sitting right next to it.
Bandai Namco’s financial reporting and Steam activity data both point in the same direction: when Elden Ring is in the conversation – whether through DLC, updates, or community milestones – Dark Souls traffic stagnates. Players who might have made their first run through Dark Souls 3 or replayed Demon’s Souls are routing toward the Lands Between instead. The franchise isn’t being killed. It’s being eclipsed.
The Scale Difference Is Now Impossible to Ignore
Elden Ring crossed 25 million copies sold following the release of its Shadow of the Erdtree expansion in 2024 – a number that would have seemed implausible for a FromSoftware title even five years ago. Dark Souls 3, by comparison, has sold in the range of 10 million copies across its lifetime, which is respectable for a niche-origin action RPG but tells you everything about the scale gap now separating the two. The gap isn’t just commercial. It’s cultural. Elden Ring has a presence in mainstream gaming discourse that Dark Souls never fully achieved outside its dedicated fanbase.
Shadow of the Erdtree’s release pulled even veteran Souls players back into Elden Ring rather than pushing them toward replays of older titles. That pattern matters because replay culture has historically been one of Dark Souls’ strongest assets. Players don’t just beat Dark Souls games – they run them repeatedly, building new character classes, attempting no-hit challenges, routing speedruns. Elden Ring now absorbs that behavior entirely. A player who might have launched a fresh Pyromancer run in Dark Souls 3 is more likely to spend that same weekend experimenting with a new build in the Lands Between, where the open world offers the same sense of discovery on a third playthrough that linear Souls games reserve for a first.
What the Speedrunning and Community Data Shows
Speedrunning communities offer one of the clearest indicators of where player energy is concentrated at any given moment. Speedrun.com rankings for Elden Ring have grown consistently since launch, while Dark Souls categories – though never abandoned – show slower growth in active runners and submitted times. This is a normal lifecycle for any game series, but the pace of the divergence is notable. Elden Ring isn’t just attracting new runners; it’s absorbing runners who previously split time across multiple FromSoftware titles.
Twitch and YouTube viewership paint a similar picture. Dark Souls content still performs, particularly around anniversary moments or when a prominent streamer picks it up for nostalgia content. But those spikes are event-driven and temporary. Elden Ring maintains a baseline viewership that Dark Souls hasn’t reliably held since its own peak years. When Shadow of the Erdtree launched, it briefly pulled more simultaneous Twitch viewers than any FromSoftware content in the platform’s history – a moment that illustrated just how far the franchise has moved from its origins.
The modding community tells the same story from a different angle. Dark Souls 3 on PC accumulated a rich modding ecosystem over the years – overhaul mods, randomizers, enemy reskins, whole new areas built by fans. Elden Ring’s modding scene arrived later and with more technical friction, but it has already started drawing the most ambitious modders away from older titles. When skilled developers choose where to invest months of work, they follow the audience. Right now, the audience is in Elden Ring.
There is one area where Dark Souls holds its ground: accessibility as an entry point. Some new players approach FromSoftware games through YouTube retrospectives or “best FromSoftware game to start with” recommendation threads, and Dark Souls 1 still gets mentioned frequently in those conversations for its tighter, more linear design. But even that function is eroding as Elden Ring gets positioned – by both the community and Bandai Namco’s own marketing – as the natural starting point for new players interested in the genre.
Bandai Namco’s Silence on Dark Souls’ Future
No new Dark Souls title has been announced. No remaster of the original trilogy beyond the existing Dark Souls Remastered for DS1 has materialized. Bandai Namco has not signaled publicly whether Dark Souls as a franchise will receive new entries, remasters of DS2 or DS3, or any other form of official investment beyond keeping the servers online. That silence, extended over multiple years while Elden Ring receives DLC and continued support, is itself a message about internal priorities.
FromSoftware’s development bandwidth is finite. Building Elden Ring’s open world and then following it with a full-scale expansion takes years of the studio’s attention. Dark Souls can’t receive that same level of care simultaneously, and there’s no indication Bandai Namco is pushing for it. The publisher’s incentive structure now points entirely toward Elden Ring’s universe – where sequels, spin-offs, and additional content can attach to an IP that’s already embedded in mainstream gaming culture in a way Dark Souls never quite managed.
What This Means for Long-Term Souls Fans
For players whose first love is Dark Souls, the current moment carries a particular kind of disappointment. The games aren’t going anywhere – they’re still available, the communities still exist, and the servers for Dark Souls 3 and Elden Ring remain active. But the sense of being at the center of something, of having your preferred game be the active conversation in FromSoftware fandom, has shifted permanently. Dark Souls fans now occupy something like the position of classic Zelda fans after Breath of the Wild – devoted to something real and valuable, but aware that the franchise has moved on to different priorities.
There’s also a generational dimension worth watching. Players discovering FromSoftware for the first time through Elden Ring have no particular reason to work backward through Dark Souls. The older titles feel dated in specific ways – the hub design of Dark Souls 2, the early-game opacity of the original – that Elden Ring smoothed out. A player who starts in the Lands Between and then tries to return to Lordran may appreciate the craft but won’t feel the pull of nostalgia that kept older fans returning for years. Elden Ring isn’t just winning the present. It’s shaping what new players consider the baseline.
Bandai Namco hasn’t announced a Dark Souls 4. FromSoftware is widely reported to have multiple projects in development, but nothing aimed at returning to Lothric or Lordran has surfaced in any official capacity. The practical result is that Dark Souls, as an active franchise rather than a legacy catalog, is on indefinite hold while everything around it accelerates. Whether that hold eventually becomes permanent – or whether a future FromSoftware team returns to it once Elden Ring’s lifecycle completes – is a question that Bandai Namco hasn’t shown any urgency to answer.
