Baldur's Gate 3 Becomes Second Biggest Steam Launch Of 2023

Larian Studios's RPG Baldur’s Gate 3, set in the universe of Dungeons & Dragons, is the second most successful Steam launch of 2023. While its early access has been live for more than three years, the game launched on August 3 for PC, while the PS5 version will not launch until September 6. The game eclipsed Hogwarts Legacy and Sons Of The Forest with a peak of 472,000 players, upon its release, as confirmed by independent Steam tracker SteamDB.

The biggest Steam release to date has been Hogwarts Legacy in 2023, which saw a player count of almost 900,000 concurrent players on release during its launch period. Industry analyst Benji Sales also took to Twitter (now X) to compare launch day performances for Baldur Gate 3, Sons Of The Forest and for Hogwarts Legacy (source). 471,897 players were logged in at Baldur’s 24-hour peak according to SteamCharts.

Gamers have pointed out that Hogwarts Legacy was backed by a much bigger marketing campaign than Baldur's Gate. "It would be only fair to remind everyone Hogwarts Legacy had one of the biggest marketing campaigns in years. Baldur's Gate III on the other hand is relying almost exclusively on word of mouth. That's an insane achievement," wrote an X/Twitter user.

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"One Of The Most In-Depth And Impressively Crafted RPG Of Recent Times"

Baldur's Gate 3 has been developed in collaboration with the Dungeons & Dragons team and Hashbro's Wizards of the Coast and is based on current D&D mechanics and spells. The game promises to offer a rich narrative with unparalleled player freedom, high-stakes decisions, unique companion characters and memorable combat.' Players are tasked to save Baldur’s Gate the Forgotten Realms from a dark and threatening presence.

Players are also appreciating the game's intricacies. Not only does the game have triple the cinematic dialogue of all three of the Lord of the Rings books but one of the lead writers has shared that there are 17,000 variations of the game’s ending.  Larian’s director of publishing Michael Douse took to social media to talk about the expectations from the RPG. "We have quite a few engineers working very hard to do what no other RPG of this scale has achieved – seamless drop-in, drop-out co-op on Series S,” Douse wrote. “We hope to have an update by the end of the year.”