Larian Studios’ official launch of Baldur’s Gate 3 is making waves with PC gamers. The all-new Dungeons and Dragons RPG has proven so popular that the game skyrocketed data demands for Steam servers, slowing everyone’s downloads to a crawl.
Looking at Steam’s official data for download usage, the launch of Baldur’s Gate 3 instantly became one of the PC gaming marketplace’s most demanding times of service. As soon as the game’s launch build went live, Steam’s data usage went up exponentially.
Looking at the graph for Steam’s overall bandwidth across 48 hours, the online games stores typically sits at around 10,000Gb/s. However, as Baldur’s Gate 3 launched, that bandwidth usage skyrocketed almost 15 times to around 150,000Gb/s.
Not only does this show almost unparalleled demand for Larian’s new RPG, but also just how much data is required to launch modern, AAA-quality games. With Baldur’s Gate 3 coming in at over 120GB on PC, hundreds of thousands of gamers were downloading collective petabytes of data.
In fact, Baldur’s Gate 3 managed to hit a staggering 472,000 concurrent players on Steam upon launch. With all of these players alone, Larian’s RPG was responsible for 56.63 petabytes of concurrently downloading data. With no pre-load option available, everyone was grabbing the game at the exact same time.
Larian’s Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of those games that is just worth the hype. In our Baldur’s Gate 3 review, well, review-in-progress, we discussed the game’s unparalleled depth and ability to make even the most horrible failures fun and even rewarding. It’s a truly generstiondefining experience that all gamers should be excited to jump into.
While Baldur’s Gate 3 is currently available to purchase on Steam and GOG right now for £49.99, it’s also coming to console in the near future. Larian is currently having issues bringing the game to Xbox, but PlayStation 5 users will be able to play with no issues on September 6th, the same day that Xbox gets Starfield.