Baldur's Gate 3, pound for pound, has had more daily users in 2024 than in 2023, which feels a little bit like setting a coin spinning, going on holiday for a week, and then coming back only to find it still whirring away on your table.
That's as per Michael Douse, Larian Studios' director of publishing, who revealed some numbers on X today. According to him, Baldur's Gate 3 had 3% more daily peak concurrents, 20% more daily active users, and a 61% bump in daily Steam Deck users—in the second year of its release.
This is staggering, quite frankly, because Baldur's Gate 3 is not technically a game that's meant to be played for so long. You might see that kind of year-on-year growth out of a live service game, or an MMORPG after a new expansion pack release, but Larian's natural 20 doesn't have a whiff of any of that in it. It is objectively a game that's meant to be played for 100-something hours, lauded, loved, and put down for the occasional revisit. I feel like Kronk in Emperor's New Groove, staring at a graph and going "Well, ya got me, by all accounts it doesn't make sense."
Douse theorises that this is basically due to the recent mod support, adding to those numbers the kind of deep insights you'd expect out of a head of publishing, such as "mods are good" and "mods are very good"—he's not wrong.
While I agree with that assessment, it should be pointed out that Baldur's Gate 3's official mod support only arrived in September of this year. I'm sure another boon was Honour Mode, which released late 2023 but had players, myself included, going back for more playthroughs into early 2024 for the bragging rights of golden dice (which I snagged, thank you very much).
There are also statistical explanations—technically, Douse is measuring half a year of 2023 compared to almost a full year of 2024, since Baldur's Gate 3 came out in August last year, buoyed by a steadily-climbing cloud of early access hype. On the other hand, it released to over 875,000 players on Steam, a number that wouldn't dip below 200,000 players until the end of the year.
Honestly, maybe I'm just trying too hard to explain these natural forces. Baldur's Gate 3 feels like a gigantic milestone—an evolution of the CRPGs of yore that perfected a formula then pushed it just a little further. As a result, it's got a ton of different endings, and a story that's been slowly polished to a mirror shine with things like a new epilogue and evil endings hooking players back in. It's a 100+ hour long RPG, sure, but you might go in for a second breakfast of epic fantasy—especially when there's not much competition scratching the same, choice-based itch. Mods are good, yes, but so's Baldur's Gate 3.
