‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Prepared for 100k Concurrent Players, They’ve Gotten 700K

The title of this article is essentially meaningless.

BG3 is single player offline game, mainly distributed globally through Steam (and GOG) which runs it's own CDN for games. There is a multiplayer mode but that is co-ordinated via p2p for the most part.

The "IT team" at Larian doesn't get hit with those downloads as they only send a single copy up to Steam's CDN which handles the traffic (perhaps some backend user authentication too?)

so essentially this article is "Baldur's Gate 3, is a very popular download on Steam" just buzz to push more sales presumably.

I searched for "multiplayer" here just to see if maybe I was mistaken about this game; number of players is not a super meaningful stressor on a system when you're not providing a whole slew of live services and simulation, so I was wondering what the point of mentioning the 700k user count was.

700k players when you:

- Don't run your own game update distribution/patcher

- Don't provide real-time chat

- Don't run your own arbitration (what's the point if mostly everything is P2P/high trust sessions and cooperative?)

- ...

700k players is great for them and by all accounts they seem to have done a great job overall, but it's a far cry from League of Legends or even DotA2 in terms of system stress.