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On its first weekend after launching, Soulslike adventure Nioh 3’s whopping player count peaked at over 88,000 concurrent players on Steam, and that’s not even counting those playing on PS5 and Xbox.
That’s more than double what Nioh 2 ever reached. The record for that game is still impressive, peaking at 41,325 concurrent players when it launched in 2021. The question is, why has Nioh 3 taken the world by storm? Sure, the first two games were successful, but not to this level.
It mostly has to do with Nioh 3’s role as part of the Soulslike sub-genre. In many ways, Nioh 1 was one of the first games to adopt the Dark Souls template, with Team Ninja and Koei Tecmo putting their own spin on it.
It’s arguably where the term Soulslike was born, a term to describe a game that mirrored FromSoftware’s Souls series, but made by a different studio.
Nioh was one of the Soulslike games that caught fire, and while the first Nioh was very similar to Dark Souls and its cousins, its sequels have gradually forged their own identity.
The Elden Ring effect on Nioh 3
By the time Nioh 2 arrived in 2021, Soulslikes were far more common, but the game went out of its way to adopt more gameplay mechanics that were reminiscent of Team Ninja’s own Ninja Gaiden, allowing the series to drift away from its Soulsy roots.
Ironically, while Nioh swerved away from FromSoftware’s style, the 2022 release of Elden Ring catapulted Souls games (and Soulslikes) into the mainstream. These adventures were no longer niche, but stood shoulder-to-shoulder with all the other gaming giants.
This newfound attention had a knock-on effect on other games and franchises, as new Soulslike fans hungrily gobbled up whatever else they could find in the genre, something that naturally led them to the Nioh series, among others.
Nioh 3 has arrived at a time when Soulslikes are booming. It could even be argued that fatigue is setting in, but this just means quality games in the sub-genre stand out all the more.
Team Ninja should get its flowers for the success of Nioh 3, and while the Elden Ring effect can’t be denied, Nioh 3 has still managed to escape the shadow of the games that started it all, Demon’s/Dark Souls.
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