Baldur’s Gate 3 Is So Popular It Almost Broke Steam
Baldur’s Gate 3 launched yesterday, and it had a gigantic opening night, with thousands of players flocking to play it — at least one of which got the day off with a fake leave note. Unfortunately success can come with a dark side, and in the case of Baldur’s Gate 3, that dark side is almost breaking Steam. Oops.
Following the release of Baldur’s Gate 3 yesterday, hundreds of thousands of players began to download the 122GB necessary to install the game. There was unfortunately no preload, due to how Steam handles games in early access, so everybody who wanted to play it was stuck downloading it at the same time.
The sudden rush to download the game caused Steam to have a little bit of trouble, with downloads slowing to a crawl in some regions. Others weren’t able to download anything at all, with some users reporting that Steam itself was pretty much broken entirely. Downdetector shows that there was a big spike in reports for Steam not working exactly at the time Baldur’s Gate 3 released, which obviously is not a coincidence.
So how big exactly was that launch? Well, it was pretty damn massive, all things considered. At its peak yesterday, over 470,000 players were playing Baldur’s Gate 3 all at the same time. At the time of writing, that number is even higher, at 515,970. It’s currently the third most-played game on the platform, and has the 11th highest peak player count of any game on the platform.
It comes after literal years of anticipation and early access testing, which slowly improved the game and grew it to the behemoth it is today. It’s easily one of the biggest games we’ve seen in a long time, with over 400 hours of content on offer and a huge world to explore. Despite that, the PC requirements for Baldur’s Gate 3 aren’t actually too bad, with the minimum specs asking for a mid-range gaming PC from six or seven years ago.
Of course, there’s still a second wave of players to come. Baldur’s Gate 3 is still yet to release on PS5 and macOS, but its release there isn’t far away. Developer Larian Studios says they’re aiming for September 6, 2023 for both versions — and given we’re about a month out, there’s no reason to doubt that will happen.
