The Witcher has been the main talk of pop culture over the last month or so. This isn’t anything new; the franchise, especially the third installment, is one of the most popular names spearheading the gaming industry at the moment. CD Projekt Red, the developers responsible for The Witcher series, is also still riding the waves of hype from their upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 release.
So once the new Witcher series hit Netflix, everyone expected to see a bit of a surge in the game’s player base. What most of us didn’t expect was to see the game beat its own records. And not just the third title, but the entire franchise!
As this is being written, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt currently has 69,831 players, with a peak of 94,651. That peak was set only four hours ago, beating the previous peak of players. With this new peak, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is now the ninth most played game on all of Steam, beating out games such as Rust, Rocket League, and ARK: Survival Evolved. Directly above the game sits Path of Exile, Destiny 2, and Rainbow Six: Siege.
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It isn’t just the third title, though. The two previous games, including the enhanced editions of the first and second Witcher, are both also trending – though their numbers don’t come close to Wild Hunt’s. Currently, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings has a bit below 5,000 players, with its predecessor The Witcher having a bit over 9,000. Not bad for a game more than a decade old, and the second installment isn’t that much younger, turning nine years old this coming year.
The vast majority of this can likely be attributed to the success of the new Netflix series based on the same books that the games are based on. Combined with this, Steam has placed the franchise on the biggest sale that it has ever been on, down to $11.99 for the base game and $14.99 for the expansions, all of which are award-winning titles. When you add in the further factor that much of the world is still enjoying holidays right now, including school and work breaks, you have more people able to play it than ever before.
As the months move on, we’re getting closer and closer to the release of Cyberpunk 2077. On top of that, a new deal signed between CD Projket Red and Andrzej Sapkowski hints that we may see a fourth installment in the Witcher franchise.
