I am running out of ways to describe not just what a success Baldur’s Gate 3 is, but on a scale that no one, not even its developer Larian, predicted.
Larian’s Swen Vincke posted a tweet yesterday showing the game hitting 500,000 concurrent players, making it the third most played game on all of Steam behind only CSGO and DOTA 2. He said that he told IT to only expect 100,000 concurrents at max.
That gap has widened even further. The peak yesterday was 712,281 players, surpassing games like DOTA 2, Rust, Apex Legends, GTA 5 and PUBG. Mind you, this is a single player, hardcore RPG.
Past that, Baldur’s Gate has now broken into the top 10 peak playercounts in Steam history. It’s currently #9, getting dangerously close to Hogwarts Legacy’s 879,308, a high water mark from earlier this year. Above those two are New World, Elden Ring, Cyberpunk 2077, Dota 2, Lost Ark, CSGO and PUBG. There are only four single players games out of the top 10, as others are MMOs or PvP games.
I think that Baldur’s Gate might push even higher later today, as I’ve seen playercounts peak for many games on Sundays. While it’s not impossible the following weekend is higher, that’s a bit unlikely, as these all-time peaks often happen early on. But anything can happen, and Baldur’s Gate has already defied all kinds of odds.
We don’t know what exact sales are for Baldur’s Gate 3’s PC-only release is, but they previously moved up the date to better avoid bigger fall games, and clearly it worked. The game does not have more than four scored reviews in right now, but given all the praise, even in a year of a megahit like Tears of the Kingdom and a AAA blockbuster like Starfield coming up, there’s a serious chance Baldur’s Gate 3 could be in play for GOTY, and I imagine many individual outlets or creators may end up picking it in the end.
I think what’s the most shocking to me is the kind of game this is, a very enormous, detailed, turn-based RPG that simply doesn’t get made anymore. But while it may have fallen out of fashion with publishers and developers, that simply is not true for the general public, who raced to Baldur’s Gate 3 despite it being 20 years since the last one. Just wild to see. We’ll see what records it may break next.
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