Skip to main content

Baldur’s Gate 3 is gunning for the top of the Steam charts with jaw-dropping stats

Baldur’s Gate 3 left early access and officially launched on August 3, and it’s seeing an unprecedented level of success. At the time of writing, the peak player count for the game is hovering around 537, 000, according to data from SteamDB.

Baldur’s Gate 3 saw steady growth in player count ahead of its early access launch in recent weeks, and that player count number has only continued to skyrocket. Right now, Baldur’s Gate 3 is the third most concurrently played game on Steam. The only games Baldur’s Gate 3 is lagging behind are Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and DOTA 2, two popular multiplayer games with massive communities. PUBG: Battlegrounds, the game in fourth place, is around 200,000 players behind Larian Studios’ latest.

Steam charts show Baldur's Gate 3 at #3.
SteamDB

For a game that is from the fairly niche CRPG genre, has been gestating in early access for years, and hasn’t been as zeitgeisty as other 2023 RPGs like Starfield, these numbers are ridiculously impressive. For reference, SteamDB lists the all-time peak for Larian Studios’ previous game, Divinity: Original Sin 2, at 93,701. Then, if you want to look at older games in the Baldur’s Gate series, the all-time peak player count for Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition on Steam was 3,756 players, while the all-time peak for Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition was only 2,644.

Recommended Videos

This is a massive win for single-player games and RPGs, showing that there are plenty of people who still care for and want to play great games in that style. It’ll be exciting to see how far up this concurrent player count could go. Will it reach the heights of games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive?

Please enable Javascript to view this content

Baldur’s Gate 3 is available now for PC. It will also launch for PS5 on September 6.

Tomas Franzese
As a Gaming Staff Writer at Digital Trends, Tomas Franzese reports on and reviews the latest releases and exciting…
All companions in Baldur’s Gate 3 and how to get them
Wyll with horns dancing.

There's a lot to see in Baldur's Gate 3, but you're not going to get far without a few good companions by your side. Thankfully, you'll stumble upon a wide assortment of NPCs that'd love nothing more than to accompany you on your journey. These friendly faces fill several different roles -- from mages and healers to archers and warriors, there's bound to be a companion that augments your playstyle.

Many of these companions also come with their own series of quests and unlockable skills, turning them into more than just faceless characters to help you in combat. In fact, you can spend hours unraveling their narratives, and depending on your actions, your companions might look very different at the end of Baldur's Gate 3 than when you first met them.

Read more
The long, winding road to Baldur’s Gate 3 was paved with these Larian games
Divine Divinity (2002) gameplay

A career-crowning achievement as monumental as Baldur's Gate 3 doesn't come out of nowhere. From Divinity to Dungeons & Dragons, Larian Studios has long been one of the loudest advocates for rich storytelling and true, meaningful freedom in Western RPGs.

Larian Studios' story is a rags-to-riches tale about a group of passionate developers whose deep and diverse portfolio of games piled up for nearly three decades before Baldur's Gate 3 ever saw the light of day. Amid canceled projects, Larian narrowly skirted total bankruptcy. In order to survive, there are several points in its history when the independent studio experimented. There were dives into real-time strategy, educational games for the Belgian kids' TV station Ketnet, the Diablo-esque Divine Divinity, and Divinity 2: Ego Draconis, a third-person action RPG built on Bethesda’s Gamebryo engine.

Read more
Staff picks: How Baldur’s Gate 3 beat the odds to become our 2023 Game of the Year
Baldur's Gate 3's Karlach appears on an image that says Game of the Year 2023.

When I first started playing Baldur’s Gate 3, I was immediately hooked by its engrossing (and gross) story, meaty CRPG systems, and the most personable cast of companions I’ve seen in the genre in quite some time. I knew I was about to sink months of my life into the 100-hour adventure. Things didn’t go according to plan.

The nature of my job meant that I had to move on to Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon at the height of my obsession. Though I wouldn’t have much time to put in long play sessions, I resolved to pick away at it throughout the year on Steam Deck. It was a critical error on my part, as I’d quickly learn that the enormous RPG is perhaps the worst commute game on the planet. It felt like I could barely accomplish anything in 30 minutes. Long, turn-based battles would often take up an entire train ride and sometimes I’d simply lose any progress I made to an untimely death. I grew frustrated, wondering why I was having so much trouble finding my way back to a game I loved.

Read more