Baldur’s Gate 3 enters Steam charts’ all-time top 10 in first weekend

Baldur’s Gate 3The Dungeons & Dragons-based role-playing game from Larian Studios, hit a peak of 814,666 Steam players on Sunday — the ninth highest ever recorded on the platform.

According to SteamDB’s figures, Baldur’s Gate 3The game has dominated the Steam charts for all time, overtaking Apex LegendsFrom the Top 10. Despite the fact that it’s been available in early access form for years, the game’s launch on Thursday, Aug. 3, rode a wave of excitement and discussion that had swelled dramatically in the preceding weeks.

The scale of the game’s success surprised Larian — a Belgian developer which has an ardent following for its detailed, specialized, highly traditional RPGs in the Divinity series, but which has never enjoyed so much attention before. “Probably should stay away from the IT team for a while,” Larian’s founder and CEO Swen Vincke said on Twitter on FridayThe. Baldur’s Gate 3Steam has cracked 500,000 simultaneous players. “Told them they should expect like 100k or so at max.”

Images: Polygon, Steam

Notably, Baldur’s Gate 3 is now one of four paid, single-player games in Steam’s most-played top 10, alongside Cyberpunk 2077, Elden RingThen, Hogwarts Legacy. All the rest are free-to play multiplayer games. All four of these premium, solo games launched on Steam in the last three years — and three of them in the last 18 months.

The fifth will probably join on September 6th, when Starfield Released. Larian was brought Baldur’s Gate 3’s Steam launch forward by a month specifically to avoid a clash with Bethesda’s sci-fi epic, a decision which seems to have paid off handsomely. The PlayStation 5 version, meanwhile, was delayed a week to the same Sep. 6 date, where it should make effective counter-programming for players unable to delve into Bethesda’s Xbox console exclusive.

But Xbox players may have to wait until 2024 to play Larian’s sleeper hit. That version is delayed until Larian can get split-screen co-op working on the lower-spec Series S console — a “huge technical hurdle,” according to the studio’s director of publishing Michael Douse.