The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt has significantly more players on Steam
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, the critically acclaimed four-and-a-half-year-old RPG from Polish developer CD Projekt Red, has seen significantly more players on Steam over the past weekend. This is probably related to the release of the Netflix series The Witcher.
The website Steamdb keeps it at a peak of 49,466 players on Steam in the last 24 hours, while the comparable site SteamCharts comes in at 49,278. These numbers are significantly higher than the average of the past 30 days, which according to SteamCharts is about 15,700 players.
According to the data from this site, there was still a slight increase in the summer month of July to an average of 18,400 players, but the monthly average in the months before and after July generally did not exceed 13,000. The Steam record is set at 92,268 players, which was achieved in the year of release: 2015. SteamCharts analyzes the number of players who play a game simultaneously via Steam; other sources such as GoG are not included in the numbers.
The sharp increase is striking, partly because the game is almost five years old and multiplayer is missing. The current peak of nearly 50,000 players is comparable to the peak that the PC version of Red Dead Redemption 2 reached on Steam on Sunday. The actual peak of this Rockstar game was probably a bit higher, because the game on PC can also be played via the Epic Games Store and the Rockstar Games Launcher and those numbers are not included.
The increase in Steam player numbers for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is likely related to the recent release of the Netflix series The Witcher. This TV series is not so much based on the games and is based on the book series by author Andrzej Sapkowski, although there are enough elements that will be recognizable for players of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
Developer CD Projekt recently announced that it has signed a new agreement with the writer. Perhaps that perpetuates the arrival of a new The Witcher title, but it will also bring Sapkowski more money. Last year he filed a claim of almost 15 million euros with CD Projekt, but with the new agreement that cold is probably out of the blue.