The Witcher 3’s newly released Remastered edition has dramatically rekindled interest in the 11-year-old role-playing game, which is currently enjoying its highest concurrent player-count on Steam ever.
As of the time of writing, nearly 120,000 people are playing The Witcher 3 on Steam, making it the ninth most-played game on the PC platform. That of course does not include numbers from the likes of GOG and the Epic Games Store, where it’s also being sold, nor the players on PlayStation, Switch 2, and Xbox.
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According to Steam data-tracking website SteamDB, that’s the highest concurrent player-count The Witcher 3 has ever had – higher than at its launch in 2015 (a high of 92K), and higher than the game’s previous peak of 103K in January 2020, when Netflix’s Witcher show was at its most popular. The other notable peak was 89K in December 2022, when the next-gen update dropped.
With a playerbase of 65 million, there’s a large community to excite, but it’s a reminder of how much pulling-power CD Projekt Red’s fantasy RPG has, all the same. And as America wakes up and downloads the update, the question is how high can the numbers go?
The Remastered edition of the Witcher 3 rolls out today, bringing with it a vast array of upgrades to the way it looks and plays. Though as I found out while playing The Witcher 3 – Remastered, the changes aren’t as quite as transformative as some might hope, and it’s still very much the same game.
Nevertheless, this Remastered update being free to owners of any version of The Witcher 3 – and the game’s existing expansions Hearts of Stone and Blood of Wine being thrown in for free as well – represents extraordinary game-support and generosity on the part of CD Projekt Red. And it’s being done to prime the audience for the arrival of the new Witcher 3 expansion Songs of the Past next year.