Baldur’s Gate 3 is breaking Steam records and quickly entered the platform’s top 10 most popular games ever, not even a week after the RPG from Larian launched on Aug. 3, 2023. Baldur’s Gate 3 broke Steam in the hours following its release, but still managed to accumulate nearly half a million concurrent players before the end of the day.
Since then, it’s hit an all-time concurrent peak of 814,666 concurrent players on SteamDB, which makes it the ninth most popular Steam game ever. It joins the ranks of just three other single-player games in Steam’s top 10, including:
- Cyberpunk 2077: 1,054,388 (fifth place)
- Elden Ring: 953,426 (sixth place)
The other games in the mix are multiplayer games, mostly competitive ones such as DOTA 2 and PUBG, with two MMOs – Lost Ark and New World. While the other games in the top 10 have fewer than 100,000 concurrent players at the time of writing – except CS:GO, which has 877,000 while the sequel-revamp rolls out – Baldur’s Gate 3 is holding at a steady 600,000 or more.
Since launch on Aug. 3, 2023, it’s become the most popular pre-order on the PlayStation Network, ahead of its PS5 release on Sep. 6, 2023.
What’s notable is that the trend in thinking about what makes a popular video game shifted in the past decade away from deep, narrative-driven experiences like Baldur’s Gate 3 toward free-to-play and multiplayer games. While there’s certainly plenty of demand for the latter, the numbers show there’s just as much desire for the former as well.
The popularity took Larian completely by surprise. Studio co-founder Swen Vincke said on Twitter that he should probably leave the IT team alone for a while. Management told the team to expect maybe 100,000 users at launch, but not many more.
Meanwhile, Starfield, the year’s other big, single-player RPG, launches on Steam and Xbox Series X|S the same day as Baldur’s Gate 3 for PS5.
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF
