We’ve known Baldur’s Gate 3 was selling extremely well on Steam since day one. After all, Larian’s triple-A cRPG broke various concurrency records on Valve’s platform, reaching rank #9 on Steam’s all-time concurrent player chart with a peak of 814K users. Last Sunday, the game registered a new peak of 875K concurrent users, nearly matching the eighth game on that chart (Hogwarts Legacy, another massive success in this year of records, which peaked at 879K on Steam).
Earlier this week, Circana (NPD) analyst Mat Piscatella also shared some incredible engagement numbers, showing that Baldur’s Gate 3 players log into the game for an average of more than five hours each day.
Now, however, we’ve got a concrete figure from a reputable albeit unlikely source. The Belgian Embassy congratulated Larian (a studio founded and headquartered in Ghent, even though they also have offices in Barcelona, Dublin, Guildford, Kuala Lumpur, and Quebec) with a post on the Chinese social media platform Weibo.
In the post, the Belgian Embassy claims that Baldur’s Gate 3 has already sold over 5.2 million units on Steam alone. The game is also available on GOG, though CD Projekt RED’s own digital store is far smaller than Steam, so GOG’s sales are probably just a fraction in comparison.
A few days before the August 3rd release, Larian Studios CEO Swen Vincke confirmed that over 2.5 million digital copies of the game had already been sold during the lengthy early access period. We can therefore deduce that Baldur’s Gate 3 sold around 2.7 million units in the span of two weeks
It’s an unprecedented success for a cRPG, a genre that not long ago had essentially vanished from the mainstream. It was only the advent of Kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms that allowed the creation of new games like Harebrained’s Shadowrun Returns, Dragonfall, and Hong Kong, Larian’s Divinity: Original Sin 1 & 2, inXile’s Wasteland 2 & 3, Obsidian’s Pillars of Eternity I and II, and Owlcat’s Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous.
While most if not all of these games were successful in their own right, Larian cemented itself at the very top of the genre with Divinity: Original Sin 2, thus earning Wizard of the Coast’s trust to make the long-awaited third installment in the Baldur’s Gate franchise.
The rest, as they say, is history. With such a huge IP and a powerful partner at its back, Larian tripled in size to create Baldur’s Gate 3, delivering an absolutely massive game that includes over 175 hours of cinematics featuring voice actors like J.K. Simmons, Jason Isaacs, Matthew Mercer, Maggie Robertson (Lady Dimitrescu in Resident Evil Village), and Doug Cockle (Geralt of Rivia in The Witcher series), among others.
While no game is perfect (Baldur’s Gate 3’s thorn seems to be performance in Act 3), Baldur’s Gate 3 is a fantastic game that deserves all its success, as outlined in our 9.5/10 review. It’ll be interesting to see if it resonates with the same strength among console users when it launches on PlayStation 5 early next month.
