On August 3, the full version of Baldur's Gate 3 was released on Steam. Player count rapidly skyrocketed. There were numbers of 100, 200, 300 thousand concurrent players, and it continued to grow.
By the evening of August 5, the peak concurrent player count of Baldur's Gate 3 on Steam exceeded 658 thousand players (and subsequently accelerated to 712 thousand). This result allowed the role-playing game to enter the top 10 most popular in Steam's history.
In 10th place was the free-to-play Goose Goose Duck with 702,845, and Apex Legends ranked 11th with 624,473.
Remarkably, Baldur's Gate 3 creator Swen Vincke did not come close to expecting such numbers:
“Probably should stay away from the IT team for a bit — I told them they should expect 100k or so at max”.
Baldur's Gate 3 has already been released on torrents + on GOG, which means the “total concurrent players” could be significantly higher.