Baldur’s Gate 3 Briefly Takes Out Steam, Dominates Twitch

Baldur’s Gate 3 has launched on PC, and even without knowing sales or metascores yet, it has already taken the internet by storm.

As reported by Insider Gaming, Baldur’s Gate 3 has reached a peak of 383,007 players on Steam. That makes it the third most played game in terms of concurrent players, just behind DOTA 2 and CSGO.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is not on the Epic Games Store, but it is on GOG. While CD Projekt RED doesn’t get datamined for outages or concurrent players, we can see that it has been very well received there as well. For those looking for a DRM-free Baldur’s Gate experience, you can rest assured with its 4/5 overall rating.

In any case, the real story is still on Steam, where it incurred so many downloads that it briefly took Steam out. It couldn’t be helped, either, as this PC release came before any of the console releases. So this was the only way Baldur’s Gate 3 players were going to get the game right now.

On top of that, it was a hefty 122 GB download on Steam. It’s possible that people who knew and were willing to buy the game out of Steam, DRM-free on GOG, were the real lucky ones, because they didn’t force their way into being one of the potential thousands or even millions of players who gave Steam the legitimate, non-malicious equivalent of a DDOS attack.

Finally, it obviously didn’t help that Larian didn’t arrange for preloads to be available for the game either. As they explained, Steam didn’t allow preloads for games designated on Early Access, but this still seems like it could have been avoided.

For those of you who were curious, Baldur’s Gate 3 is designated as Playable on the Steam Deck. That is a notch lower than Verified, and there’s a reason for that.

Baldur’s Gate 3 uses the Larian client. That client will create problems when you try to run it on the Linux based Steam Deck. The game will try to run with the client by default, and that will then require that you take out the mouse and keyboard, or load up the virtual keyboard. This can be changed in the Steam Deck’s settings, but because you need to make these changes on your own, and it doesn’t just run on its own, it isn’t Steam Deck Verified.

If you do have a Steam Deck and want to play this game on it, you can follow PCGamer’s compatibility guide for it here.

Baldur’s Gate 3 will be releasing on PlayStation 5, as well as on MacOS, on September 6, 2023. Larian Studios is famously still working on the Xbox Series X|S version, and they hope to have an update for it before the end of this year.