Legit impressed by Baldur's Gate 3 performance, it made it up to 9th place on the all-time peak concurrent players rankings for Steam, and 4th place looking at games that are singleplayer or primarily singleplayer, behind only Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring, and Hogwarts Legacy. With these kind of sales, Larian should be able to go properly AAA on their next game if they choose to. I just hope that Sony doesn't decide to snatch them up to compete with Xbox's WRPG dominance between Bethesda, Obsidian, inXile, and Playground RPG studio, or that Larian refuses to sell if Sony does make an offer.

Shame that it's looking like we will have to wait until 2024 to play it on Xbox. The lack of compromise from both parties is what lead to this sadly, Larian was unwilling to compromise and delay splitscreen on both S and X until they could find a way for S to run splitscreen at an acceptable framerate, while Xbox was unwilling to grant them a special exception to their S and X feature parity rule by allowing Larian to delay splitscreen on S only. What hurts the most is knowing that splitscreen, a feature likely used by less than 10% of modern gamers, is what lead to this delay.

The only thing that lessens the sting of having to wait until at least January to play Baldur's Gate 3 is that we Xbox owners get to play Starfield a week after what would have been the PS5 and Xbox Series release week for BG3. Thankfully Starfield is looking to be a massive game that I will likely sink at least 200 hours into on my first playthrough, as you can easily sink 200 hours into Skyrim and Bethesda has suggested that Starfield is bigger than Skyrim in terms of main+side content. So Starfield should keep me busy for most of the rest of the year, while other late 2023 releases I want to play like AC Mirage, Forza Motorsport, and Avatar should be able to keep me busy the rest of the wait for BG3 on Xbox hopefully.

So AoE 3 DE is going FTP in some capacity?

I'm honestly expecting BG3 to go even higher this coming weekend as more positive word of mouth spreads throughout the week and more critic reviews come in. I was thinking Starfield could surpass CP2077's Steam record for highest concurrent player count for a single player game, which it very well still could, but I wouldn't be surprised now if BG3 does it first!

Eh, I'd say Baldur's Gate 3 is already AAA...Larian is a 450+ employee studio and Baldur's Gate 3 has been in development for 6 years, the budget definitely won't be AA. They have already confirmed though that their next projects will be a lot smaller, they're changing into multiple teams, which was to be expected, this was sort of a "everyone all out on this single game" and now they need to recharge probably.

It's definitely impressive, I think Larian may have pushed this genre into the mainstream. As for being acquired, Larian is owned by only 3 people, Vincke who owns the majority of the shares with his wife and then Tencent owns 30%. To sell, Vincke would have to sell his shares and he said he isn't interested in selling only a week ago.

Sony would have to hope that Tencent wouldn't be interested which after Baldur's Gate 3's performance, they probably would be, Sony also tried to acquire Leyou until Tencent got involved, pushed them out of negotiations and set up exclusive negotiation rights with Leyou, Lol. 

Makes me wonder what Starfield will do.

There's the 5 days early access which might hurt its peak and it being on PC Game Pass but those are both minor things.

Starfield is tracking incredibly well on Steam and has been since pre-orders opened, IIRC by both follower count and pre-order charting it is tracking ahead of Elden Ring and Hogwarts Legacy. It has re-entered top 10 at #5 for Steam's pre-orders a month from release and it never really went too far from the top 10 to begin with, I know some will probably freak out if Starfield doesn't hit 90+ (even if it hits 89, Lol) but I don't think reviews are going to hurt this for launch, perhaps for the longer term but there's already a huge amount pre-ordering it.

And this is before the main marketing campaign has kicked off.

I may stick a poll up, Lol.

Starfield and BG3 gonna be doing insane numbers on Steam. Both may end up topping CP2077 lol. 

Currently, Starfield is at #7 in Global Top-Sellers on Steam. #6 if you want to exclude the Steam Deck. That's pretty crazy when we're still weeks from release. Hogwarts also had a 5 day early access and I wouldn't say it hurt its peak as is it nearly topped 900,000 concurrent players when it fully released. 

I wish MS would announce sales numbers for their games at least. Pretty sure FH5 has sold extremely well but nobody knows it since MS won't tell us.

Starfield is a 125GB install.

Supposedly, pre-install starts in 2 days.

Is Xbox planning a new marketing campaign for Halo Infinite after all the updates????