The Witcher 3 Remastered breaks the RPG's all-time Steam peak hours after launch with a surging player count that shows no signs of slowing down
And this is just on PC
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered launched only a few hours ago, but it's already broken the 2015 RPG's all-time player record on Steam and shows no signs of slowing down.
It's been 11 years since the launch of The Witcher 3, and being the great game it is, it's had many peaks over its lifetime. Looking at SteamDB, after debuting with a healthy peak of over 92k concurrent players on Steam in its launch month, it eventually surpassed its own record five years later in January 2020, shortly after the first season of The Witcher TV series aired, bringing in 103k players.
Even though it's had its highs since – thanks to the TV show and the 2022 next-gen update, for example – The Witcher 3 has never surpassed that 2020 peak… until now. Within hours of launch, The Witcher 3 Remastered has pushed the RPG past its old record, and it keeps gaining more and more concurrent Steam players basically by the minute. It's at 120,324 at the moment, but I've had to update this multiple times since I began writing this article.
And, as you may have noticed, in many parts of the world at the moment, including the US, UK, and Europe, we're in the middle of a working day. A huge chunk of players won't have even had the chance to dive into the remaster yet, so we can definitely expect this to go up further in the hours to come, and perhaps even more come the weekend.
It'll be interesting to see if CD Projekt Red gives any insight into how many of these are returning players versus completely new ones. The Witcher 3 Remastered is available as a free update to anyone who already owned the base game, so there's a huge incentive there for veteran fans to return to the RPG (assuming they needed one in the first place).
And, so far, it's not just the player count that's looking positive. The Witcher 3 Remastered's Metacritic score doesn't just make it the best-rated game of 2026, but also the best version of The Witcher 3 to date.
I'm GamesRadar+'s Deputy News Editor, working alongside the rest of the news team to deliver cool gaming stories that we love. After spending more hours than I can count filling The University of Sheffield's student newspaper with Pokemon and indie game content, and picking up a degree in Journalism Studies, I started my career at GAMINGbible where I worked as a journalist for over a year and a half. I then became TechRadar Gaming's news writer, where I sourced stories and wrote about all sorts of intriguing topics. In my spare time, you're sure to find me on my Nintendo Switch or PS5 playing through story-driven RPGs like Xenoblade Chronicles and Persona 5 Royal, nuzlocking old Pokemon games, or going for a Victory Royale in Fortnite.
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