Baldur's Gate 3 dev still floored by the RPG's sustained popularity: "644,205 average daily players in the last 7 days is still so insane to me this far from launch"

Yeah, sure, Baldur's Gate 3 was popular last year when it became the biggest RPG out there and vacuumed up all those GotY awards, but with a zillion other games launching every day, are people still playing it? Yes, it turns out. The answer is very much yes.

Michael 'Cromwelp' Douse, director of publishing at Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian, revealed the game's current player stats on Twitter this week, saying "644,205 average daily players in the last 7 days is still so insane to me this far from launch." That's an extremely impressive number, especially since - as Douse notes - those players are "just on Steam," and don't count anybody who's trucking through the game on PS5 or Xbox. 

This is also a rare insight into what an average daily player count looks like for a game like Baldur's Gate 3. Concurrent player tracking for Steam games is tracked through external sites like SteamDB, but that's only a partial metric that tells us how many players are in-game at one specific time. If a game's popularity is spread out over various parts of the world, for example, you're only going to see diluted player count peaks. Average daily players make for a much more robust and meaningful metric of success.

Whatever metric you measure Baldur's Gate 3 by, it's clear that the RPG is a stunning success story, flinging Larian into the public spotlight. While the studio had its name on a long line of beloved CRPGs, Baldur's Gate 3 brought that niche lineage into a level of explosive success that I can't remember seeing since the likes of The Witcher 3.

Some of those Baldur's Gate 3 players are the Honour Mode speedrunners who have fought to bring the world record under 19 minutes.