Baldur's Gate 3 breaks into top 10 Steam games by peak concurrent players, although Swen Vincke expected 100k CCU at max
Baldur’s Gate 3 has every chance of becoming one of the most successful releases of 2023. The game’s performance during its first four days of launch has exceeded everyone’s expectations, including Larian Studios founder Swen Vincke.
- As we reported last week, Baldur’s Gate 3 peaked at over 472k concurrent users (CCU) in less than 24 hours since its global launch on Steam.
- Over the weekend, player count continued to increase, eventually peaking at 814,666 CCU (via SteamDB).
- The game was 64,642 concurrent players short of overtaking Hogwarts Legacy, the biggest Steam launch of 2023 by that metric.
- Interestingly, Swen Vincke wrote on Twitter that he told Larian’s IT team that they “should expect like 100k [CCU] or so at max.” Critical miss, shall we say?
Where does Baldur’s Gate 3 rank among the top Steam games by peak CCU?
- The results were enough to make Baldur’s Gate 3 the 9th Steam release of all time in terms of peak CCU. Larian’s newest RPG outperformed Goose Goose Duck (702k CCU), Apex Legends (624k), and Valheim (502k).
- PUBG is still the undisputed all-time leader with over 3.2 million peak concurrent players, followed by CS:GO (1.8 million) and Lost Ark (1.3 million).
- If we exclude multiplayer-only titles from the chart, Baldur’s Gate would be the fourth biggest game on Steam in terms of peak CCU, behind Hogwarts Legacy, Elden Ring (953k), and Cyberpunk 2077 (over 1 million).
Top 15 Steam games of all time by peak concurrent players
Released on August 4, Baldur’s Gate 3 currently has a 92% rating on Steam based on over 99k user reviews. Given that most of them were written during Early Access, it is better to look at the recent score — 95% (“Overwhelmingly Positive”) based on 43k reviews.
Larian Studios also pushed the release date of the PC version forward almost a month, allowing Baldur’s Gate 3 to gain even more space and attention. On September 6, the game will come out on PlayStation 5, where it is currently taking the pre-orders charts by storm.
