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Baldur’s Gate 3 has had an astoundingly successful launch by pretty much every reasonable metric and now, 24 hours after release, Larian’s latest RPG has surpassed the launches of even Bethesda titans like Skyrim and Fallout 4 on Steam.
As of this writing, Baldur’s Gate 3 has reached 532,876 concurrent players on Steam, as SteamDB shows. That’s the 11th-biggest concurrent player count in the platform’s history, just behind the free-to-play Apex Legends. It’s the third-biggest single-player RPG launch in Steam history, behind Cyberpunk 2077 and Elden Ring, and the second-biggest launch of any genre in 2023, behind the open-world action game Hogwarts Legacy.
Maybe most notably, Baldur’s Gate 3 has surpassed the concurrent player records of both Fallout 4 (472,962) and Skyrim (287,411), which were set with each game’s respective launch. Now, that’s not a perfect comparison, since Steam itself has gotten dramatically more popular in the years since the releases of those games. This is as much about the growth of Steam as it is about the success of Baldur’s Gate 3.
But there’s a special relationship in this moment between Larian and Bethesda. After all, Baldur’s Gate 3 and Starfield are unquestionably the two biggest RPGs of the year, and console warriors have been determined to pit the two games against each other, since they’ll be launching for competing consoles on the same day. But that’s really all fandom talk, as the two studios have nothing but kind words for each other on social media.
Thanks @BethesdaStudios, we look forward to journeying through space with you next month!August 3, 2023
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In any case, all this success has surprised even Larian. CEO Swen Vincke tweets that he “probably should stay away from the IT team for a while – told them they should expect like 100k or so at max.”
Check out our Baldur’s Gate 3 review in progress for an early verdict, or dig into our Baldur’s Gate 3 launch coverage for much, much more.
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