Baldur's Gate 3 hits "way over" 10 million lifetime players, still boasting impressive retention

Larian Studios hasn’t officially announced the sales figures for Baldur’s Gate 3. But thanks to one of the studio’s employees, we now know that the game has already reached way over 10 million players.

Michael Douse, director of publishing at Larian Studios, took to X (formerly Twitter) to discuss upcoming mod support for Baldur’s Gate 3. He noted that communicating with players and modders is taking more time as the game’s community continues to grow.

“This is a game that went from ~2 mil players to way over 10 in a very short space of time, so it’s natural the conversation becomes muddier and complex,” Douse wrote.

The 2 million mentioned by Douse likely refers to the number of copies sold prior to the game’s global launch. As Larian CEO Swen Vincle told Bloomberg last year, BG3 reached 2.5 million units sold during the Early Acces period.

This is a game that went from ~2 mil players to way over 10 in a very short space of time, so it’s natural the conversation becomes muddier and complex. But in order to maintain the same level of dialogue, we need people to understand that these conversations take time.

— Very AFK (@Cromwelp) February 25, 2024

Given that Baldur’s Gate 3 is a premium title that is not available on any subscription service, 10+ million players probably equals the number of copies sold. It is unclear how sales are split between PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S, but the Steam version is likely the number one platform by player count.

In December, we guesstimated the number of Baldur’s Gate 3 owners at over 7.5 million based on the fact that over 1.3 million players have completed the game on PC and PS5. It has since come out on Xbox Series X|S and performed well during the holiday sales thanks to first-ever discounts, which also contributed to its audience growth.

This makes Baldur’s Gate 3 the most successful CRPG in recent years. Even six months after its global launch, the game still has hundreds of thousands of daily active users, which is an impressive achievement for any project regardless of genre.

Last week, Douse noted that BG3 enjoyed “644,205 average daily players in the last 7 days” on Steam alone. It is not to be confused with concurrent users (CCU), which currently peak at 120k-160k CCU per day on average (also very impressive!).

Baldur’s Gate 3 has an all-time high of over 875k concurrent players on Steam. This is the second-best launch of 2023, behind only Hogwarts Legacy.

644,205 average daily players in the last 7 days is still so insane to me this far from launch (just on Steam)

— Very AFK (@Cromwelp) February 23, 2024

Right now, Larian Studios is working on further patches and hot fixes, which sometimes result in breaking mods. The studio plans to add cross-platform mod support for BG3 later this year, with Douse urging players not to get angry at developers, support teams, or mod creators. “99.9% of our community are the absolute best and it’s because of them — thankfully — that my community team persevere,” he wrote on X. “But I suppose it was inevitable that when you have a city, a few bad eggs will start a fire.”