Baldur’s Gate 3 has reached “way over” ten million players

That’s the most precise number we got so far
Baldur’s Gate 3 has reached “way over” ten million players
Baldur’s Gate 3 has reached “way over” ten million players /

Though Baldur’s Gate 3 has massively exceeded the expectations of developer Larian Studios and pretty much everyone else with its immense success last year, we don’t actually have any precise sales numbers for the CRPG aside from the fact that 2.5 million units were sold during Early Access – which is already quite the feat. With the game continuing to hang around the top of Steam’s bestsellers and getting launches on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S in the meantime, that number must have grown considerably.

Thanks to Larian’s Michael Douse, the studio’s director of publishing, we at least have a general range of Baldur’s Gate 3 sales now, though. In a series of posts regarding the current row about mod support in the game, he mentioned that Baldur’s Gate 3 “is a game that went from [around] two million players to way over ten [million] in a very short space of time.”

BG3 artwork showing Astarion, Shadowheart, Lae'zel, Gale, and Wyll.
Baldur's Gate 3 deservedly swept up most of 2023's Game of the Year awards / Larian Studios

Estimates of Baldur’s Gate 3’s sales have been anywhere from 7.5 to 20 million units by various services, sites, and experts, so it’s good to finally have a somewhat official number to go by – even though “way over ten million” isn’t the most precise figure. Still, it comes from an authority that has to be in the know, making it a more reliable number than anything else out there.

That success, as Douse wanted to illustrate by sharing that range of sales, came at a price for Larian: Though a majority of the Baldur’s Gate 3 community is positive and supportive, as usual there is a minority of troublemakers – a fact that becomes inevitable with player numbers in that category. At the moment, that vocal minority of “bad eggs,” as Douse called them, is making a big stink due to Larian not yet having shared plans for mod support on all platforms.

Douse said that the team would share updates on that soon and that it worked on official mod support since launch. He added: “As always, we’ll discuss it in our way with our community. Threats and toxicity against our devs and community teams will only harm the conversation. Please stop that.”

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Marco Wutz
MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg