Baldur’s Gate 3 is already one of Steam’s biggest games ever

Baldur’s Gate 3 is already one of Steam’s biggest games ever

Time Stamp: August 7, 2023 5:58 AM
Source Node: 2807585

Baldur’s Gate 3, the Dungeons & Dragons-based role-playing game from Larian Studios, hit a peak of 814,666 Steam players on Sunday — the ninth highest ever recorded on the platform.

According to SteamDB’s figures, Baldur’s Gate 3 stormed the all-time Steam charts over the weekend, displacing Apex Legends from the top 10. Despite the fact that it’s been available in early access form for years, the game’s launch on Thursday, Aug. 3, rode a wave of excitement and discussion that had swelled dramatically in the preceding weeks.

The scale of the game’s success surprised Larian — a Belgian developer which has an ardent following for its detailed, specialized, highly traditional RPGs in the Divinity series, but which has never enjoyed so much attention before. “Probably should stay away from the IT team for a while,” Larian’s founder and CEO Swen Vincke said on Twitter on Friday, as Baldur’s Gate 3 cracked 500,000 concurrent players on Steam. “Told them they should expect like 100k or so at max.”

The most played games chart on Steam shows Baldur’s Gate 3’s “peak today” figure as 814,666
Official Steam figures show Baldur’s Gate 3’s (current) peak player record of 814.666.
Image: Steam via Polygon

Notably, Baldur’s Gate 3 is now one of four paid, single-player games in Steam’s most-played top 10, alongside Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring, and Hogwarts Legacy. The rest of the chart is composed of free-to-play multiplayer games. All four of these premium, solo games launched on Steam in the last three years — and three of them in the last 18 months.

They will likely be joined by a fifth in on Sep. 6, when Starfield is released. Larian brought Baldur’s Gate 3’s Steam launch forward by a month specifically to avoid a clash with Bethesda’s sci-fi epic, a decision which seems to have paid off handsomely. The PlayStation 5 version, meanwhile, was delayed a week to the same Sep. 6 date, where it should make effective counter-programming for players unable to delve into Bethesda’s Xbox console exclusive.

But Xbox players may have to wait until 2024 to play Larian’s sleeper hit. That version is delayed until Larian can get split-screen co-op working on the lower-spec Series S console — a “huge technical hurdle,” according to the studio’s director of publishing Michael Douse.

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