Baldur's Gate 3 is a single-player role-playing game that has more daily users than its release date in 2024.

Baldur's Gate 3 had more daily users, pound for penny, in 2024 than 2023. It feels like setting a spinning coin, going on vacation for a week and then returning to find it still spinning on your table.

Michael Douse, Larian Studios director of publishing, revealed some numbers today on X. According to him Baldur's Gate 3 saw a 3% increase in peak concurrents per day, a 20% increase in daily active users and a 61% increase in daily Steam Deck users during the second year after its release.

This is quite astonishing, to be honest, as Baldur's Gate 3 was not designed to be played so long. This kind of growth can be seen in a live service or MMORPG following a new expansion, but Larian's Natural 20 is not one of them. It's a game meant to be played and loved for 100 hours. I feel like Kronk from Emperor's New Groove staring at a chart and saying "Well, ya' got me, it doesn't seem to make any sense."

Douse thinks that the mod support is the main reason for this. He adds to these numbers the kind deep insights you would expect from a head in publishing, like "mods work" and "mods work very well" -- he's right.

I agree with this assessment, but it is important to note that Baldur's Gate 3 only received official mod support in September of this past year. Honour Mode was another boon, as it released in late 2023, but players like myself, and even me, continued to play through the game into early 2024, all for the bragging right of golden dice.

There are also statistical explanations--technically, Douse is measuring half a year of 2023 compared to almost a full year of 2024, since Baldur's Gate 3 came out in August last year, buoyed by a steadily-climbing cloud of early access hype. It was released to more than 875,000 Steam users, a number which wouldn't drop below 200,000 until the end the year.

Maybe I'm trying to explain these forces too hard. Baldur's Gate 3 is a huge milestone, an evolution of the CRPGs from yore. It perfected a formula and then pushed it a little bit further. It has a lot of different endings and a story which has been polished to a high shine. Things like a new epilogue or evil endings are what keep players coming back. It's a long RPG of 100+ hours, yes, but it's also a game that you may want to play again, especially when there aren't many other games scratching the same choice-based itch. Mods are great, but Baldur's Gate 3 is also worth a look.