As you are probably aware, the Dark Souls series is known for being notoriously difficult, a fact reflected on the Steam achievement page.
The Steam achievement system not only shows players if they have earned an achievement, it also shows the percentage of players with a specific achievement. When looking at a game like Dark Souls, people can see just how committed (or uncommitted) the player-base is when it comes to completing the game.
Maybe I was rushing ahead of myself, as this first statistic shows that 9.5% of players haven’t even lit the first bonfire. That is probably around three minutes of gameplay, five at most if you managed to fall of the cliff at the beginning. There are multiple reasons as to why this is, but the one I haven’t seen touted is the idea of third party sellers with the game pre-purchased on accounts. This is a common practice among third party sellers. It wouldn’t surprise me if some traders had intended to sell the game using these accounts but never saw the sales from them. Of course, there’s also the idea that 9.5% of players simply suck at the game.
One of the more surprising stats (considering the previous one) is that 37.9% of players have defeated the final boss. It goes to show that a big portion of the players who purchased Dark Souls 3 actually spent the time to finish it.
Namco Bandai have released information detailing the number of copies Dark Souls III has shipped around the world. So far, Dark Souls III has shipped three million copies; five hundred thousand in Japan and Asia, one and a half million in North America and one million in Europe. We are unaware how many of those copies were sold on PC, but if it’s even a quarter of those numbers, that makes the 37.9% of players who finished the game even more impressive. Thank you Gematsu for providing the translation of Namco Bandai’s sales figures.
A big thank you goes to Sherif Saed at VG247 for finding this information. Click the link to read a few more interesting stats about the Dark Souls 3 player-base.
