The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt has broken its own record for the most concurrent players on Steam. The Witcher 3’s older record was 92,000 concurrent players, a record set back on its launch in 2015. Now the game is seeing traffic up to 94,000 players. This propels Witcher 3 past more established free to play games such as Team Fortress 2 and Warframe. Currently, the whole Witcher trilogy sits on Steam’s top 100 games by player count, with previous games The Witcher at 12,000 and The Witcher 2 at 6,600. This, of course, is only tallying Steam’s account and not other PC launchers such as GOG or Epic.
These record numbers for The Witcher 3 are notable as it is rare for games to ever eclipse their day one player counts and much less so for single player only games. The Witcher 3 is four years old, releasing back in 2015 and until recently was only averaging 15,000 players. This massive achievement follows another landmark as last week The Witcher 3 surpassed Rockstar’s newest entry Red Dead Redemption 2 in total concurrent player count. Unlike The Witcher 3, Red Dead Redemption 2 has multiplayer component that boosts the game’s average number of players. A combination of the new Netflix series going by the same name and based on the same source material along with a large discount is contributing to the spike in the game’s popularity. The holiday season also probably has contributed to this milestone as more people had spare time to sink on gaming.
Recently CD Projekt and CD Projekt Red, publisher and developer of The Witcher series along with the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077, recently made a new deal with the writer of the original book series Andrzej Sapkowski. This new deal appears to bring the hope of a continuation of The Witcher saga in the future as the deal allows CDPR to use any characters or the setting in any game medium they wish.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is currently available for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, and Nintendo Switch.