Baldur’s Gate 3 falls just shy of Hogwarts Legacy’s Steam concurrent player record

Baldur’s Gate 3 has come within touching distance of Hogwarts Legacy‘s peak concurrent player record on Steam.

On August 13, 10 days after its release, the game registered a peak concurrent player count of 875,343, according to SteamDB.

The figure was seemingly driven not only by the popularity of Larian Studios‘ RPG, but also by several notable influencers in the gaming space pushing players to get online at the same time and attempt to beat Baldur’s Gate 3’s previous record.

While the effort did manage to handily eclipse the game’s previous peak, it wasn’t enough to secure Baldur’s Gate 3 the spot as the game with the 8th highest concurrent player count of all time. That record still belongs to 2023’s biggest launch, Hogwarts Legacy, which attracted 879,308 concurrent players when it was released in February.

Notably, while many big releases tend to reach their concurrent player peak within a few days of their release, as was the case for Hogwarts Legacy, Baldur’s Gate 3 seems to be growing a steady stream of players over a slightly longer period, having topped its concurrent player count record several times last week.

While Steam’s list of the most played games by concurrent players features a number of huge multiplayer titles, like the 3,257,248 players PUBG: Battlegrounds attracted at its peak to claim the top spot, the record for traditional single-player titles is held by Cyberpunk 2077, at 1,054,388.

Since its release, Baldur’s Gate 3 has been lauded by players and critics. The game’s first reviews have seen it surpass The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom as the highest-rated game of 2023, according to review aggregator Metacritic.