Within hours of its launch on 3 August, over 470,000 people were playing Baldur’s Gate 3 simultaneously, according to Steam.
Everything about Baldur’s Gate 3 is big. Its campaign is said to last a whopping 80 hours or so. Its file size is a hard drive-filling 122GB.
Then there’s the RPG’s launch, which has been similarly huge. According to Steam’s own stats, displayed on its ‘Most Played’ page, 472,136 people were playing Baldur’s Gate 3 simultaneously in the hours since it launched at 4pm UK time on 3 August.
At the time of writing, there are 291,095 players currently logged in and questing their way through Larian Studios’ much-anticipated Dungeons & Dragons epic.
To get an idea of what a big deal this is, consider that the only two games that are more popular on Steam at present are Dota 2, in second place with a peak of 572,473 players, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, with just under 1.2 million players. Those are far bigger numbers, obviously, but Dota 2 and CS:GO are also established, free-to-play multiplayer games that encourage lots of people to login and play at once. Baldur’s Gate 3, by contrast, is a single-player experience, costs £49.99 at present, and has already been in Early Access for about three years.
The clamour surrounding Baldur’s Gate 3 was such that Steam experienced a huge spike in downloads, as you can see by the graph below. As noted by Rock Paper Shotgun, Valve’s servers just about coped with the surge in demand, but still received a number of outage reports around the time of Baldur’s Gate 3′s launch yesterday.
That’s a lot of downloads. Credit: Valve.
Baldur’s Gate III is therefore one of the year’s biggest PC releases by far, and its console ports are still to come: the PlayStation 5 version is due out on 6 September, while its counterpart for Xboxes is set to follow at an unspecified date.
We’ll be bringing you whynow Gaming’s verdict on Baldur’s Gate III in due course. In the meantime, why not check out our 2020 chat with executive producer David Walgrave?
Read more: Baldur’s Gate III preview | “We started a Forgotten Realms University”
