Baldur's Gate [[link]] 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, . 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.
Douse theorises that this is basically due to the , 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 . I'm sure another boon was Honour Mode, which released late 2023 but had players, myself included, into early 2024 for [[link]] the bragging rights of golden dice ().
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 [[link]] 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 and 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.