Baldur's Gate 3 breaks 814K Steam CCU, but Larian wants next game to be smaller (and stay independent)

Baldur's Gate 3 continued to break Steam records for concurrent players over the weekend. In our last report, the game had reached 646,000 concurrent users, placing it at #10 on the all-time list.

We assumed that the game would easily surpass the number 9 ranked game, Goose Goose Duck, which peaked with 702,000 concurrent users. However, Baldur's Gate 3 far exceeded this estimate, reaching 814K players around eleven hours ago. At this point, not even Hogwarts Legacy (currently #8 on Steam's all-time top chart) is safe with its 879K record, although concurrency records are usually broken on weekends, and here we are on Monday. Maybe the game can try it next weekend.

Despite all this success, it sounds like Larian Studios isn't looking to make another game as big as Baldur's Gate 3 as their next project. That's the sentiment conveyed in a Bloomberg interview by CEO Swen Vincke, anyway. In his chat with Jason Schreier, Vincke said that he would rather work on smaller games next time, and also hinted that Larian may finally be ready to tackle multiple projects at once.

If that made you hopeful for a revival of Divinity: Fallen Heroes, the turn-based tactics game announced in 2019 as a co-development project with Expeditions studio Logic Artists and put on hold later that year as Larian focused entirely on Baldur's Gate 3, it won't happen. In another recent interview with Eurogamer, Swen Vincke said that Fallen Heroes is gone for good, which is unfortunate given the very positive hands-on preview written by Chris Wray before the game was put on hold indefinitely.

There's another notable tidbit in the Bloomberg interview: Larian is seeking to remain independent amid the current consolidation of the gaming industry. Some internal documents that emerged during the Microsoft vs FTC trial showed that the Xbox house was looking at Larian (among many game developers) as a potential acquisition target. To that Vincke said:

It's always flattering. I'm getting older, but I'm certainly not done yet. The strength of this company is that I am very invested in the gameplay and I also make the final decisions. We can do things in service of the games we make.

Whatever Larian does after Baldur's Gate 3, it's sure to get industry attention after a success of this magnitude.