Larian's boss worried Baldur's Gate 3 had peaked in early access, so its massive 800K concurrent player launch was 'way, way beyond' expectations

pcgamer.com:

On Saturday, Larian founder Swen Vincke watched Baldur's Gate 3's concurrent player count on Steam break 800,000, earning it a spot among Steam's all-time most-played games. His reaction? 

«God, I hope there's no big bug left,» he told me with a laugh Monday morning.

Vincke said that he «held his heart» during the launch, hoping that millions of players didn't run into a progress-blocking bug of some kind. «I don't want to have that anger over me, but it's part of the risk of making these very large RPGs,» he said.

On Friday, approximately 24 hours after Baldur's Gate 3 launched on PC, Baldur's Gate 3 had already passed 500,000 concurrent players; at the time, Vincke tweeted that he had informed the IT team managing Larian's account login servers to expect something like 100,000 players max. Their last game, Divinity: Original Sin 2, had peaked at just over 90,000 concurrent players.

«This was not in the books at all. This was way, way beyond what we expected. There's also no precedent for it, for our type of game to have that many people playing concurrently… Everybody here is very happy. You see a lot of smiling faces. At the same time, a lot of focus. We have reports coming in from people having issues, so we're focused on fixing those issues, that's very much on everyone's minds.»

Thanks to bug fixing tools they've built for the game, Vincke said Larian's able to quickly determine what went wrong when players report issues. And luckily being off in his player estimate by half a million people or so didn't cause any catastrophes—just a bit of scrambling to make sure the servers stayed online.

Vincke did have one other worry in the lead-up to Baldur's Gate 3's launch: that its early access success (to the tune of 2.5