Larian Studios’ Baldur’s Gate 3 is currently the biggest game of the year, and it’s not just gamers who are surprised. The massive success of the new Dungeons and Dragons RPG is also a surprise to the game’s developers.
In an interview with PC Gamer, Larian Studios’ founder Swen Vincke revealed that the massive success of Baldur’s Gate is a huge surprise to the company. While the game was expected to be well received, its massive popularity was unexpected.
At the time of writing, Baldur’s Gate 3 has entered Steam’s all-time Top 10 games with a monumental base of 800,000 concurrent players. The RPG’s launch even slowed down Steam’s servers as gamers downloaded more than ten times the average amount of data.
In the interview, Vincke explained that he worried Baldur’s Gate 3 has peaked during its Early Access period. While the game has only just released, the game has been playable in an unfinished form since 2020. However, during that period, the game only reached a peak of 16,792 players, almost 50 times less than its current peak.
“We've seen that in the past, other games were very successful in early access and then on the day of release they didn't sell much more because they saturated already," Vincke explained. "That was my biggest fear, that that had happened. It was a thing I worried about, because it is Dungeons & Dragons and a more complex ruleset, so getting people on-boarded is not the easiest thing in the universe. That was one thing where I said if there's a risk, that's it, people saying 'I'm not doing this Dungeons & Dragons stuff.'"
Vincke explained that the rampant success of Baldur’s Gate 3 won't change anything about the types of games Larian Studios makes. “We are on the road that we wanted to be on. It's a little bit slower than we expected, because the events of the last couple years have slowed down development for everybody, but this is what we want to do,” he said.
Before launch, Vincke told Larian Studios’ IT Team to expect around 100,000 users to be playing on launch date, more than the 90,000 concurrent peak of their last game — Divinity: Original Sin 2. Of course, we now know that Vincke’s expectations were completely blown away.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is currently available on PC via Steam and GOG. A PS5 version is also releasing on September 6th, but the in-development Xbox version is having issues running on Xbox Series S.
If you want to read more about Baldur’s Gate 3, check our review here.