Larian finally breaks silence, confirms "way over" 10 million people have played Baldur's Gate 3

26.02.2024 - 20:10 / gamesradar.com / Michael Douse / Jordan Gerblick

We may never know exactly how many people are playing Baldur's Gate 3 across PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC, but thanks to Larian Studios director of publishing Michael Douse, we now know the total player count is well over 10 million.

Baldur's Gate 3 has been topping charts since its full release back in August, but its total player count across all platforms has remained, and will likely continue to remain, a mystery. That said, we now have our clearest indication yet of just how many people have played our 2023 GOTY so far, with Douse recently confirming that number to be at least 10 million.

In a thread of tweets aimed at "a few bad eggs" apparently sending toxic messages and threats to Larian as it gears up for Baldur's Gate 3 mod support, Douse casually and vaguely reveals: "This is a game that went from ~2 mil players to way over 10 [million] in a very short space of time."

Although there are a number of ways to get an idea of Baldur's Gate 3's success, none of them paint a comprehensive picture. For example, we can use Steam's database to see its peak concurrent player count - that is, the most people playing at a single instance - is a staggering 875,000, placing it on the platform's top 10 most-played games ever. We also know it was Steam's best-selling and most-played game of 2023, but again, that doesn't factor in PlayStation and Xbox.

We still don't know exactly how many copies Baldur's Gate 3 has sold, but it's almost certainly more than 10 million. Although local multiplayer allows two people to play at the same time, in all other instances a single player generally equates to a single copy sold. Since Douse says the player count is "way more" than 10 million, you can pretty safely bet more than 10 million copies have been sold, which is astounding for what many once assumed would be a fairly niche release.

Even Baldur's Gate 3 developers are 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."