Baldur's Gate 3 Passes Half a Million Reviews on Steam and 96% Are Positive

[John Elden Ring]

Larian Studios' RPG Baldur's Gate 3 is extremely popular, but just how popular is it? A milestone passed on Steam certainly paints a positive picture. We learn that the game has passed a whopping half a million verified user reviews on Steam, sitting precisely at 500,048 at the moment of this writing.

96% of them are positive, giving the game the coveted "overwhelmingly positive" review label on the platform.

Director of Publishing Michael Douse celebrated the achievement on X (formerly Twitter), also thanking Larian's community team.

Ty for 500,000+ Steam reviews. An insane number. I remember 9 years ago or so I used to look at games with that many reviews thinking how insane it was. Now we’ve hit that number all I can think is… thank fuck for our community team.

Source

 

[Nhomnhom]

Just wrote mine right now, the GOAT.

 

[Evilnemesis8]

500k Steam reviews and then another 60k from other sources.

Game is going to get a lot more reviews in the near future. Only one small 10% sales so far.

If you guys didn't know, at 20% is the threshold where Steam sends you an email/notification that a game is on sale if you're following/wishlist a particular product. This is why a bunch of games(mostly EA and/or small indie titles) have that 10% launch discount, they want to entice new potential buyers but not THAT much

Discounting (Steamworks Documentation)

partner.steamgames.com

Self-Serve
Partners are able to create and manage the following discounts on their own. Any discount set to 20% or greater will automatically trigger email notifications to players with your game on their wishlist. Discounted titles are eligible to appear in various 'specials' sections throughout Steam, based on your game's tags, popularity of your game, and to users that it is recommended.

 

[Yurinka]

So more than a dozen million copies sold on Steam alone?

 

[Evilnemesis8]

So more than a dozen million copies sold on Steam alone?

Review estimates for a game might be significantly inflated when a game becomes the HOT THING and everyone is saying to people to give the game a try. Difficult to get a grasp on how much the game sold really.

Personally I'm hoping that Sven Vincke(the CEO/Founder of Larian) mentions sales data as part of his GDC conference.

A behind the scenes look at the key development and market challenges encountered while making Baldur's Gate 3, how the team tried to deal with them, what lessons they learned and why Larian was uniquely placed to make this game successful.
Takeaway

Every game has its own language and a large part of development is learning what that is. You will get a unique behind the scenes look at how we adapted our development pipelines and studio strategies to ensure we became fluent in BG3's incredibly complicated dialect.
Intended Audience

Anyone interested in the challenges of game development at a large scale. There is no prerequisite knowledge necessary to understand the content of this session.

Larian in general doesn't really talk about sales but he did give a sales figures back in 2019 when he did a GDC post-mortem on Divinity:Original Sin 1.

 

[Yurinka]

Review estimates for a game might be significantly inflated when a game becomes the HOT THING and everyone is saying to people to give the game a try. Difficult to get a grasp on how much the game sold really.

True, there are several cases where the review estimates are pretty wrong: as you mention, the hot games you mention often have more reviews than usual. Same goes with games that are broken or piss off their fans: they have more reviews than usual due to players being angry.

As they are based on averages, sales estimates based on reviews are normally more accurate with average games.