Eleven years after launch, The Witcher 3 has never been this popular on Steam. According to SteamDB figures, CD Projekt Red’s RPG hit a new all-time concurrent player peak of 137,000 on October 4 — roughly one week after the free Remastered edition arrived on September 29 — and the numbers are still increasing day to day.
Beating Every Record in Its Own History
The new peak towers over every previous moment in the game’s chart history. The original 2015 launch topped out at roughly 92,000 concurrent players. The Netflix show’s popularity drove a then-record 103,329 in January 2020. December 2022’s next-gen update produced an 89,000 peak. Even the Remastered edition’s own launch day record of around 120,000 — set just six days earlier, when the game was briefly the ninth most-played title on Steam — has now been surpassed. And Steam is the only platform with public player counts: with GOG, the Epic Games Store and consoles added, the true total is far higher across the game’s 65-million-strong playerbase.
It’s a stunning result for a decade-old game, and it puts The Witcher 3 ahead of recently released AAA titles on the Steam charts — including Control Resonant, one of September’s biggest launches.
The Free Upgrade That Keeps on Giving
The Remastered edition is a free update for existing owners on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S and Switch 2, with upgrades to visuals, performance and gameplay — CD Projekt Red has said it wants the game to feel like a 2026 release — and the Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine expansions thrown in as well. The momentum is no accident: it primes the audience for Songs of the Past, a brand-new expansion set after the events of Blood and Wine, which sends Geralt on a personal mystery centered on the bard Dandelion and is due in 2027.
Whether the player counts hold at this level is another question — but for an 11-year-old RPG to be setting all-time records in 2026, a week after its own free relaunch, is something no other game in Steam’s history has managed quite like this.
Sources
- DualShockers — The Witcher 3 Just Shattered Its All-Time Steam Player Record 11 Years After Launch
- TechPowerUp — The Witcher 3 Remastered Tops 120,000 Concurrent Steam Players, Beating Its All-Time Record
- Eurogamer — The Witcher 3 surges to its highest Steam concurrent player-count ever, following Remastered edition’s release