Even Baldur’s Gate 3’s developers are surprised by how many people are playing the game

Baldur’s Gate 3 arrived on Aug. 3 to whisk players off on a custom RPG adventure of their own design, and although the devs had decently high hopes for the game, it seems they shot way too low in their expectations to the point that even they are amazed at how many players are delving into the game. Just one day after launch, Baldur’s Gate 3 has over 550,000 concurrent players on Steam.

Swen Vincke, the CEO of Larian Studios, only expected around a maximum of 100,000 players, so the half-million players in the game right now well exceeded the devs’ highest expectations. Vincke joked on Twitter that he may need to “stay away from the IT team for a while” since the devs told them the peak number of players they could likely expect to see would likely be around 100,000, not anywhere close to the current numbers.

Related: Should you use Illithid Powers in Baldur’s Gate 3?

This is especially astonishing when you take into account that the game was previously in early access for around three years from Oct. 6, 2020 all the way up until its release, and yet the excitement for the game still managed to reach these heights.

Compared to the concurrent players across all of Steam’s games, Baldur’s Gate 3 is currently holding the second most players overall and is only surpassed by extremely steep competition with CS:GO reigning supreme. Dota 2 and Baldur’s Gate 3 have gone back and forth vying for the second spot on the list.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is not only bringing in a massive number of active players, but it’s also doing quite well overall. It already has nearly 80,000 Steam reviews with “Very Positive” evaluations overall and “Overwhelmingly Positive” reviews for the most recent 22,000 assessments.

With how positive players’ reactions to Baldur’s Gate 3 have been so far, it wouldn’t be too surprising if it manages to break its own concurrent player record yet again sometime soon, as the RPG smashes every expectation the devs had. Console players haven’t even had a chance to get it on the action yet since the console release dates are different from the PC one, so there’s a good chance even more players will arrive to defy the devs highest hopes.