Baldur’s Gate 3 enjoyed an incredible launch this week, becoming one of the top 3 most-played games with its player count. The game was expected to get the attention of its fanbase, but the game did more than anticipated. The game’s current success was clearly a shock to the team, and the Larian Studios CEO Swen Vincke admits that. In a tweet, he shared his thoughts about the current hype on the game, and he added that the team’s expectations were far below the game’s peak player count of over 700 thousand concurrent players. Baldur’s Gate 3 became a success story for the studio, so let’s listen to the studio’s thoughts on this.
Baldur’s Gate 3’s Player Count Surprised Even Larian Studios Itself
The news was revealed with a joke by the company CEO Vincke. He claims that the expectation shared with the IT team was for the game to hit 100K concurrent players at max, which is far below what actually occurred. The game’s highest concurrent player number was around 721K yesterday, and today’s peak was 500K. That must be a source of pride for Larin Studios, and it’s also reminding us being a daydreamer isn’t always a bad habit. There are plenty of congratulatory messages in the comments; you can also check out the jokes shared in the section.
Probably should stay away from the IT team for a while – told them they should expect like 100k or so at max https://t.co/TY0aSrmWEx
— Swen Vincke @where? (@LarAtLarian) August 4, 2023
If you need an answer to why the game was more successful than expected, the probable answer is marketing. There are also other factors, such as the timing and promised features, but we saw the best marketing ever made for Baldur’s Gate 3 franchise. Since brand-awareness ad campaigns can’t always give accurate data to the studios, even the studio’s CEO didn’t expect a success like this. With Baldur’s Gate 3‘s debut, we can say that 2023 already became a fantastic year for RPG lovers. The previous hit was Diablo 4 in the RPG category, and now there’s a new game to spend hours and hours on. The main game isn’t enough; we expect the game’s Xbox version and content expansions in the future months.
