Highlights
- Baldur's Gate 3 is quickly approaching the record number of concurrent players on Steam set by Hogwarts Legacy, indicating its strong popularity among gamers since its release.
- While Baldur's Gate 3 has only been available on Steam and GOG, unlike Hogwarts Legacy which was available on multiple platforms, the former's numbers better reflect its true popularity among players.
- The success of Baldur's Gate 3 shows the potential for a revival of high-budget CRPGs, a genre that has been largely ignored by mainstream publishers in recent years.
Baldur's Gate 3 is closing in on Hogwarts Legacy's record number of concurrent Steam players. This development illustrates how the fandom has been quick to embrace Larian Studios' latest title as soon as Baldur's Gate 3 released to rave reviews on August 3.
Following a prolonged period of Hogwarts Legacy's dominant Steam sales, Avalanche Software's hit Harry Potter RPG still holds the title of the biggest 2023 launch on Valve's platform. Days into its release, Hogwarts Legacy peaked at 879,000 concurrent Steam players, thus also becoming WB Games' biggest PC launch in the publisher's history.
Some six months later, Baldur's Gate 3 finds itself within reach of that impressive record, as Larian's newest RPG boasted 814,666 concurrent Steam players during its launch weekend, according to public account data scraped by SteamDB. Since AAA games historically hit their player peaks early into their market debuts, it's dubious whether Baldur's Gate 3 will actually manage to surpass Hogwarts Legacy in the coming days. After all, even the current record holder slowed down after 72 hours, with Hogwarts Legacy's player count experiencing a dramatic drop in the weeks that followed its release.
One important distinction between the launch of Hogwarts Legacy and Baldur's Gate 3 is that the latter has so far been limited to Steam and GOG, whereas the former included Steam, Epic Games Store, and current-gen consoles. Meaning that Hogwarts Legacy's early Steam figures were likely diluted by the game's wider availability, while the Baldur's Gate 3 numbers are a better representation of its current popularity.
But even just being in the same ballpark as one of the most universally appealing games of the year is an astonishing achievement for Baldur's Gate 3, not least because classic CRPGs are a much smaller niche compared to open-world role-playing games that focus on action. The immense success of Baldur's Gate 3 has also inspired hope among the genre's aficionados that Larian's latest title will usher in a return of high-budget CRPGs, the type of games that mainstream publishers have largely ignored since the early 2000s.
The game's current commercial momentum could also help convince Larian to consider committing to DLC for its acclaimed RPG, assuming post-launch content isn't already in the works. No such expansion has been yet been announced, with Baldur's Gate 3's boss recently revealing that the studio still hasn't decided on its next project. The first two Baldur's Gate games had both received one major expansion each about a year into their respective releases. However, that track record might not mean much two decades later, especially seeing how Larian has historically preferred delivering complete experiences followed by the occasional definitive edition, but no extensive post-launch content support.
Baldur's Gate 3 is available now on PC and launches September 6 on PS5, with an Xbox Series X/S port also being in development.
Source: SteamDB