Baldur's Gate 3 Unable to Dethrone 2023's Most Popular Steam Game

Everyone is playing Baldur's Gate 3 on Steam, but not enough to make it 2023's top dog.

By Tyler Fischer

Baldur's Gate 3 is the highest-rated game of 2023, according to Metacritic, but it's been unable dethrone Steam's most popular game of the year, and it doesn't look like this is going to change. The new RPG from Larian Studios currently has 598,782 concurrents playing on Steam at the moment of writing this. This means it has the third most active concurrents on the platform. This number is substantially lower than its all-time peak though, which occurred five days ago. On August 13, the game amassed a whopping 875,343 concurrent players. Of new games released this year, that's the second most concurrent players any game has posted, but it's just short of the numbers Hogwarts Legacy posted six months when it garnered 879,308 concurrent players. 

At this point, it's unlikely Baldur's Gate 3 will beat this number as it's moment to do so has come and go. It's concurrent players has been going down, not up. And there's a good chance this number won't be beat by any other game this year, though there are a couple of releases that have a chance of dethroning the Harry Potter game. 

More specifically, if the record is going to be beat, it will likely be by Starfield or possibly Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. That said, with the latter available with Xbox Game Pass, which will take players away from Steam, and the performance of recent COD releases on Steam, we don't anticipate Hogwarts Legacy crown being taken down by either.

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All of that said, it was no surprise Hogwarts Legacy exploded in popularity upon release. Not only is it a very solid game, it's the first Harry Potter game in years. Harry Potter remains one of the biggest IP in entertainment and an under served one at that. Everything before its release suggested Hogwarts Legacy was going to be massive, and this held up. However, Baldur's Gate 3's success has been a bit more surprising. Many expected it to perform well critically, but nobody forecasted it do as well commercially as it has been doing. 

As always, feel free to leave a comment letting us know what you think. Do you think any game will dethrone Hogwarts Legacy this year or was Baldur's Gate 3 the final release with a shot?

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