Baldur’s Gate 3 Breaks 814K Steam CCU, But Larian Wants the Next Game to Be Smaller (and to Stay Independent)
Baldur's Gate 3 continued to break Steam concurrent player records over the weekend. In our last report, the game had reached 646K simultaneous users, placing itself in the #10 spot on the all-time chart.
We surmised the game would easily surpass the game ranked #9, Goose Goose Duck, which topped out at 702K concurrent users. However, Baldur's Gate 3 went far and beyond above that estimate, reaching 814K players around eleven hours ago. At this point, not even Hogwarts Legacy (currently #8 on Steam's all-time peak chart) is safe with its 879K record, although concurrency records are usually broken on weekends, and we're now on Monday. Perhaps the game can give it a try next weekend.
Despite all this success, it sounds like Larian Studios isn't looking to create another game as big as Baldur's Gate 3 as their next project. That's the sentiment conveyed in a Bloomberg interview by CEO Swen Vincke, anyway. In his chat with Jason Schreier, Vincke said he'd rather work on smaller games next and also hinted that Larian might be finally ready to tackle multiple projects at once.
If that made you hopeful for a revival of Divinity: Fallen Heroes, the turn-based tactics game announced in 2019 as a co-development project with Expeditions studio Logic Artists and put on hold later that year as Larian focused entirely on Baldur's Gate 3, that won't be happening. In another recent interview with Eurogamer, Swen Vincke said Fallen Heroes is gone for good, which is unfortunate given the very positive hands-on preview penned by Chris Wray before the game was put on indefinite hold.
There's another noteworthy tidbit in the Bloomberg interview: Larian seeks to remain independent amidst the current consolidation spree of the games industry. Some internal documents that emerged during the Microsoft vs FTC trial showed that the house of Xbox was looking at Larian (among many game developers) as a potential acquisition target. To that, Vincke said:
It's always flattering. I’m getting older, but I’m certainly not done yet. The strength of this company is that I’m very invested in the gameplay, and I also make the ultimate decisions. We can do things in service of the games we’re making.
Whatever Larian is doing after Baldur's Gate 3, it's certain to have the attention of the entire industry after a success of this magnitude.
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