Perhaps it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, but it looks like the debut of The Witcher on Netflix has caused a large number of players to either return to The Witcher 3 or play it for the first time.
A couple of popular websites that chart Steam players across nearly every game on the platform report that The Witcher 3 enjoyed a massive jump in overall and concurrent players during the last week and over the weekend. How massive? That’s a great question, and the answer seems to be the subject of some dispute. However, it looks like The Witcher 3 peaked at about 30,000 to 50,000 concurrent players during the last week.
As PC Gamer points out, that number is made all the more impressive when you realize that about that many people were playing Red Dead Redemption 2 via Steam during that same time. Considering that Red Dead Redemption 2 was released on Steam not that long ago and was one of the most anticipated PC ports of 2019, it’s quite shocking that a single-player game first released in 2015 was able to match its player count.
As we said, though, maybe it shouldn’t be that shocking. The Witcher 3 is considered by many to be one of (if not the) best games of its generation. It’s a sprawling RPG epic that benefits from some incredible writing, all-time great quest design, and a cast of memorable characters, many of whom were taken from the same book series that Netflix’s The Witcher is based on.
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As for that series…well, it left a mostly negative impression on us, but some of the show’s better moments (most of which occur during the final episodes) suggest that there’s serious potential for this series in the long run. At the very least, the rise in The Witcher 3‘s player count confirms that there’s still a ton of interest in this franchise from those who discovered it via the video game series.
For more information on The Witcher, be sure to check out our explanation of the Netflix series’ first-season finale.
Matthew Byrd is a staff writer for Den of Geek. He spends most of his days trying to pitch deep-dive analytical pieces about Killer Klowns From Outer Space to an increasingly perturbed series of editors. You can read more of his work here or find him on Twitter at @SilverTuna014.
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