The peak Baldur’s Gate 3 player number, 814,666, is ninth on the all-time list!
Baldur’s Gate 3, Larian Studios’ Dungeons & Dragons-based role-playing game, reached a record 814,666 concurrent players on Steam on Sunday. This is the ninth-highest ever on the platform!
According to SteamDB data, Baldur’s Gate 3 stormed Steam’s all-time charts over the weekend, knocking Apex Legends out of the top 10.
Even though the game had been available in early access for years, its regular release on Thursday rode a wave of excitement and controversy that had swelled dramatically in previous weeks.
The extent of the game’s success surprised Larian. The Belgian developer has an enthusiastic fanbase for its detailed, specialised RPGs in the Divinity series, which have a long tradition. But the studio has never before enjoyed such attention. “Probably should stay away from the IT team for a while – told them they should expect like 100k or so at max,” Larian founder and CEO Swen Vincke said on Twitter on Friday. At the time, the game had just broken the 500,000 concurrent player mark on Steam. According to the list of most-played games on the platform, Baldur’s Gate 3’s “current peak” is 814,666.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is now one of the four most-played paid single-player games in Steam’s top 10. The other three are Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring and Hogwarts Legacy. The rest of the list is made up of free-to-play multiplayer games. All four premium solo games have been released on Steam in the last three years – three of them in the previous 18 months. A fifth is likely to join them on September 6 when Starfield is released.
Larian specifically brought forward the Steam launch of Baldur’s Gate 3 by a month to avoid a clash with Bethesda’s sci-fi epic, and that decision seems to have paid off.
The PlayStation 5 version, meanwhile, has slipped a week to the same September 6 date. Here could be an effective counterpoint for gamers who can’t get into Bethesda’s Xbox-exclusive game.
Xbox players, however, may have to wait until 2024 to play Larian’s sleeper hit. That version will be delayed until Larian can get the split-screen co-op game to work on the slower-speed Series S console. That’s a “huge technical hurdle”, according to Michael Douse, the studio’s publishing director.
Probably should stay away from the IT team for a while – told them they should expect like 100k or so at max https://t.co/TY0aSrmWEx
— Swen Vincke @where? (@LarAtLarian) August 4, 2023
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