Launching in full for PC last week after spending nearly three years in early access, Baldur’s Gate 3 has got off to a stellar start, perhaps even to a level that’s caught many by surprise. On top of widespread praise, the game has been pulling in players in drove, having enjoyed a peak concurrent user count of over 814,000 on Steam (as per SteamDB), which is the ninth-highest concurrent user count game has ever seen on the platform. All the excitement surrounding it has also boosted the upcoming PS5 version’s sales.
The success that the RPG has enjoyed in the wake of its full release has, in fact, taken even developer Larian Studios by surprise. Larian CEO and Baldur’s Gate 3 director Swen Vincke has previously revealed that the studio expected at most 100,000 peak concurrent players upon release, which means it’s outperforming Larian’s expectations by over 800%.
Speaking recently with PC Gamer, Vincke spoke about the game’s success further, saying that for hardcore DnD-based CRPG, the numbers that the game is seeing are “way, way beyond” what even Larian had expected, while adding that the development team is currently focused on addressing bugs technical issues being reported by players. A hotfix for the game was released a couple of days after launch.
“This was not in the books at all,” he said. “This was way, way beyond what we expected. There’s also no precedent for it, for our type of game to have that many people playing concurrently… Everybody here is very happy. You see a lot of smiling faces. At the same time, a lot of focus. We have reports coming in from people having issues, so we’re focused on fixing those issues, that’s very much on everyone’s minds.”
Vincke also went on to say that his personal fear for launch had been that after having spent a considerable amount of time in early access, Baldur’s Gate 3 would be “saturated” and wouldn’t “sell much” upon its 1.0 release. During its early access period, the game sold over 2.5 million units.
“We’ve seen that in the past, other games were very successful in early access and then on the day of release they didn’t sell much more because they saturated already,” Vincke said. “That was my biggest fear, that that had happened. It was a thing I worried about, because it is Dungeons & Dragons and a more complex ruleset, so getting people on-boarded is not the easiest thing in the universe. That was one thing where I said if there’s a risk, that’s it, people saying ‘I’m not doing this Dungeons & Dragons stuff.”
In our review of Baldur’s Gate 3, we awarded it a score of 10/10, saying, “Like Divinity: Original Sin 2, Baldur’s Gate 3 redefines what a role-playing game can offer in character-building, combat, story-telling and choice. It’s a compelling experience that simply shouldn’t be missed.” Read the full review through here.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is currently available only on PC, but will also be launching for PS5 on September 6. Xbox Series X/S audiences will likely have to end up waiting until next year.