Baldur’s Gate 3 is out after years in Early Access, and PC players on Steam are showing up in droves to celebrate. According to SteamDB, Larian Studios’ sprawling RPG has managed to reach more than half a million concurrent players only 24 hours after release. At the time of this story’s publication, the in-game peak player count sits at 593,788, with the number slowly increasing as time goes on. That makes Baldur’s Gate 3 the second biggest Steam launch of the year, with Hogwarts Legacy coming in first with a concurrent player peak of 879,308 and Sons of the Forest in third with a peak of 414,257.
Larian and Dungeons & Dragons fans have waited years to finally get their hands on the full Baldur’s Gate 3 experience. Larian, which is also behind the critically acclaimed Divinity: Original Sin series, announced its take on the Baldur’s Gate universe all the way back in 2019. Although the team’s ambitious RPG would then go on to launch in Early Access in 2020, players were left playing that pre-release version until the full experience released yesterday, August 3. While many of the players contributing to today’s astonishing statistics likely already checked out the Early Access build, half a million players is still quite the feat.
The Baldur’s Gate 3 player count will only grow when its PlayStation 5 version finally arrives on September 6. Player numbers will only increase further when Larian finally releases its Xbox version, which is sadly without a release date due to some technical setbacks. Regardless, Baldur’s Gate 3’s future looks bright, so be sure to stay tuned for updates on how it will all shake out.
