The main events of the weekend (June 22-23)

The rating for the Elden Ring expansion on Steam dropped to "mixed" due to its high difficulty, the creators of Second Wave announced the impending closure of their studio, and the number of players in Microsoft Flight Simulator exceeded 15 million. Here's what happened in the gaming industry over the weekend.

Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree

• The Elden Ring expansion, Shadow of the Erdtree, launched on Steam with a "very positive" rating, but it soon turned "mixed." At the time of writing, it had 31,400 reviews, with only 64% being positive. Judging by comments, players are mainly dissatisfied with the expansion's extreme difficulty—they complained about bosses with massive health reserves and generally poor game balance. Many also noted optimization issues. However, none of this stopped users from actively playing. According to SteamDB, the Elden Ring online player count on Steam reached 781,200 over the weekend.
• South Korean studio Challengers Games announced that the launch of its two games, Second Wave and iLLANG, was a financial failure. The studio operated at a loss for a long time in hopes of a miracle (employees haven't been paid since March), but their expectations were not met. By June, they had completely run out of funds, and their total debt grew to 2.4 billion won ($1.7 million). Amidst all this, Challengers Games decided to close down. The servers for their games are set to shut down on June 25, and the studio itself will soon follow.
• The creators of Microsoft Flight Simulator announced that the flight simulator has been tried out by 15 million people. It took just under four years to reach this milestone. Microsoft Flight Simulator was released on August 18, 2020, for PC and Xbox.