Baldur's Gate 3 hits half-a-million Steam reviews, and reading them has been 'pure joy,' says Swen Vincke

Astarion, a silver-haired vampire from Baldur's Gate 3, places a hand on his chest and pouts.

Larian founder Swen Vincke is reading our Baldur's Gate 3 Steam reviews, but if he hasn't read all of them, it's nothing personal: Even at a pace of five seconds per review, it would take the armor-clad CEO a month without breaks to get through every one of them. There are now over 500,000 reviews for Baldur's Gate 3 on Steam.

"Half a million is a real big number," Vincke wrote on X this week after hitting the milestone. "I wish we could get all of you in one place, shake your hands and chat about the adventure you had. But in the absence of that, reading these reviews has been pure joy."

Technically, Baldur's Gate 3 passed the 500K Steam user reviews milestone before this week. In its reviews tallies, Steam doesn't include reviews from users who didn't purchase the game directly from Steam (people who redeemed it with a code purchased elsewhere or that was given to them). In the case of Baldur's Gate 3, that excludes over 60,000 reviews from the total displayed on its store page.

At the more accurate count of about 560,000 reviews, Baldur's Gate 3 is the 25th most-reviewed game on Steam, and it's the only game in that group that was released in the past year. It's the only 2023 game in the top 39, even: The next 2023 game on the list is Lethal Company, the 40th most reviewed Steam game with 331,552. 

Counter-Strike 2 doesn't count as a 2023 game since it inherited all of CS:GO's reviews, and the same goes for the Call of Duty app, which inherited reviews from 2022's Modern Warfare 2. Granted, BG3 did spend a while in early access, but the great majority of its Steam reviews came after launch—it only had about 42,000 at the start of last August.

Here are the current top 25 most-reviewed games on Steam, via Steam250:

1. Counter-Strike 2/CS:GO: 7,886,129 (Very Positive)
2. PUBG: 2,302,472 (Mixed)
3. Dota 2: 2,170,943 (Very Positive)
4. Grand Theft Auto 5: 1,741,622 (Very Positive)
5. Terraria: 1,251,323 (Overwhelmingly Positive)
6. Rainbow Six: Siege: 1,230,621 (Very Positive)
7. Garry's Mod: 1,044,105 (Overwhelmingly Positive)
8. Team Fortress 2: 1,028,220 (Very Positive)
9. Rust: 1,027,143 (Very Positive)
10. Left 4 Dead 2: 830,387 (Overwhelmingly Positive)
11. Apex Legends: 790,218 (Mostly Positive)
12. Elden Ring: 771,252 (Very Positive)
13. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt: 763,177 (Overwhelmingly Positive)
14. Euro Truck Simulator 2: 737,632 (Overwhelmingly Positive)
15. Cyberpunk 2077: 713,957 (Very Positive)
16. Dead by Daylight: 709,472 (Very Positive)
17. Among Us: 678,889 (Very Positive)
18. Ark: Survival Evolved: 678,654 (Very Positive)
19. Phasmophobia: 655,378 (Overwhelmingly Positive)
20. Stardew Valley: 649,534 (Overwhelmingly Positive)
21. Payday 2: 649,012 (Very Positive)
22. War Thunder: 599,150 (Mostly Positive)
23. Destiny 2: 582,864 (Very Positive)
24. Warframe: 568,596 (Very Positive)
25. Baldur's Gate 3: 560,710 (Overwhelmingly Positive)

I didn't need 500,000 "Overwhelmingly Positive" Steam reviews to convince me Baldur's Gate 3 is good—we gave the RPG one of our highest review scores in recent memory—but it's yet another measure of just how astonishingly successful it's been.

The most-reviewed Steam game from this year is, no surprise, Palworld, which is quickly climbing the ranks: It currently has about 240,639 reviews, making it the 66th most-reviewed game on Steam right now.