The Witcher 3 has reached nearly 120,000 concurrent players on Steam, setting a new record for the 11-year-old RPG after the release of its Remastered edition on Tuesday, September 29. Eurogamer reports that SteamDB recorded the milestone, which also made the game the ninth most-played title on Valve’s platform at the time.

That figure covers Steam alone. It leaves out players on GOG and the Epic Games Store, as well as those playing on PlayStation, Switch 2 and Xbox, so the full crowd returning to the Continent is larger still. The Remastered edition is a free update for existing owners, giving lapsed players a fairly persuasive excuse to dust off Geralt’s swords.

A new high for an old favorite

The new peak tops several earlier surges in The Witcher 3’s long life. The game reached 92,000 concurrent Steam players at launch in 2015, then hit a previous record of 103,000 in January 2020, when Netflix’s Witcher series was at the height of its popularity.

Another notable spike came in December 2022, when the game’s next-gen update arrived. That release brought the concurrent count to 89,000, a strong result at the time but now comfortably behind the Remastered launch.

Steam milestone Concurrent players 2015 launch peak 92,000 January 2020 peak 103,000 December 2022 peak 89,000 Remastered release Nearly 120,000

The new total lands against a reported playerbase of 65 million, and serves as a reminder that CD Projekt Red’s fantasy RPG still has considerable pull. Not bad for a game old enough to have seen its fair share of monster contracts, replays and platform generations.

A generous return to the Continent

The Remastered edition brings a broad range of upgrades to how The Witcher 3 looks and plays. Eurogamer’s hands-on assessment was that the changes may not be as transformative as some players hoped: beneath the improvements, it remains fundamentally the same game. That is less a deal-breaker than a useful expectation to set before reinstalling a 100-hour RPG.

Cirilla in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

The update is free for owners of any version of The Witcher 3. The existing expansions, Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine, are also included for free, a notably generous bit of ongoing support from CD Projekt Red.

That support also points toward the next return trip. The studio is using the Remastered release to prime players for Songs of the Past, which is planned for next year. The upcoming expansion gives returning players another reason to keep Geralt’s gear close at hand.

For now, the Remastered edition is rolling out to owners of The Witcher 3, with no exact release time or full platform-by-platform schedule established in the source report. Its Steam record is already clear, though: this is the game’s biggest concurrent audience on the platform to date.

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