Baldur’s Gate 3, the highly anticipated RPG from Larian, launched after being in early access for three years, and it’s pretty safe to say fans were excited for it. Barely 30 minutes after the PC game was available to download, players started reporting problems with Steam downloads and, more specifically, download times.
It turns out that so many people tried downloading Baldur’s Gate 3 at once that the servers just couldn’t handle it. The beefy 120+ GB game takes a while to download at the best of times, but eager fans said Steam is giving estimated times ranging from eight hours to eight months.
Larian’s head of publishing Michael Douse posted an image of DownDetector’s Steam outage reports that show a massive spike in problems starting at 11 a.m. Eastern, when Baldur’s Gate 3 launched. Swen Vincke, Larian’s founder, retweeted it with a cheeky “sorry.”
— Very AFK (@Cromwelp) August 3, 2023
While your download times will undoubtedly vary, more than a few people have made it past the hurdle. At the time of publication, SteamDB shows a concurrent player count of 369,271, making it one of the best-performing new releases on the platform in 2023 – at least, ahead of Starfield‘s Steam launch on Sep. 6, 2023. Baldur is even outperforming Resident Evil 4, which broke records for Capcom’s horror franchise.
Those numbers may change as more people around the world get access to the game and actually download it, but for now, that makes Baldur’s Gate 3 the 22nd most popular game in Steam history.
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF
