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

I am a bit shocked by how popular this game is. All the signs were there, though.

- Their previous game Divinity: Original Sin 2 was critically acclaimed, very popular for a pretty hardcore CRPG, and had long legs.

- DnD has a lot of brand power and has been strongly in the zeitgeist for years.

- There's a big cohort of millennials who have strong nostalgia for Baldur's Gate and who have plenty of money to buy games (if not time to play them).

- The Early Access release for this game was wildly popular beyond the developer's expectations, and maintained interest for years.

I definitely underestimated the brand power of DnD and Baldur's Gate because they aren't very important to me, personally. But also there have been a load of really good CRPGs in recent years and there seemed to be a pretty low ceiling to how much interest they could get. Tyranny, Pillars of Eternity, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and a few others were amazing and beloved CRPG games but were lucky to have a tenth of the success of BG3. But those games were generally less accessible, mostly not multiplayer, and again lacked the brand power.

Success can also be relative. I am not a huge gamer anymore, but from what I noticed, this year wasn't really filled with many large releases yet and some that came out, like Diablo 4, are found out to be the soulless crap many more wise consumers expected it to be. So people might just be hungry for some quality games again.

Also the studio was already known for quality and some of their own brands were already quite successful, making them more or less the top CRPG developer that also brought a lot of innovation to the genre. Although Baldurs Gate certainly is a brand that draws additional people. I could imagine that their other games will also get in the focus again when people are finished with the new title.

That said, all the games you mentioned were a success I believe. Maybe not that large, but I think they all were "surprisingly" successful compared to many AAA titles that wished they were.