CD Projekt Red pushed The Witcher 3 Remastered live on 29 September, and the game broke its own player record before the day was out. SteamDB logged a peak of 120,717 players online at once, ahead of the 103,329 set back in January 2020. The studio is handing the upgrade free to anyone who already owns the game on any platform, which accounts for a fair chunk of that turnout. The remaster also ships with a built-in mod browser, consoles included.
At a glance
The Witcher 3 Remastered drew 120,717 concurrent players on Steam on launch day, according to SteamDB.
The series record previously stood at 103,329 players on 5 January 2020, during the Netflix show’s run.
Over 40 mods were available on consoles at launch through a mod.io browser built into the game.
120,717 players online at once on launch day
That figure comes from SteamDB, which tracks concurrent sessions on Valve’s platform. The 120,717 peak landed on 29 September, only a few hours after the download servers opened. For a game released back in 2015, The Witcher 3 Remastered has few comparable results to measure against.
Looking at the game’s earlier peaks puts the gap into perspective. The May 2015 launch pulled in 92,268 players, the next-gen update of December 2022 climbed to nearly 90,000, and it took the Netflix show in early 2020 to clear the 100,000 mark. Eleven years on from release, the game has just beaten all of it.
The Witcher 3 Remastered wipes out the Netflix-era peak
The free upgrade is the obvious engine behind the result. Anyone who owns the base game qualifies on any platform, and players who only had the base game also walk away with both expansions, Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine. We covered the terms of that free upgrade across four machines when it was announced.
One caveat is worth holding onto before stacking this record against other releases this year. The 120,717 count covers Steam alone, while the game is equally available on GOG, the Epic Games Store, Battle.net, the Microsoft Store, PS5, Xbox Series and Switch 2. The real total across every platform has to be considerably higher.
Watch it too
The Witcher 3 Remastered just broke its own player record
More than 40 console mods on day one
The change that shifts habits most sits outside the numbers. CD Projekt Red has folded a mod.io browser straight into the game on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series. Over 40 mods were ready to install on consoles the day it launched.
Console players running The Witcher 3 Remastered now reach custom quests, weapons, gear and balance tweaks that only PC players could install until now. Very few publishers offer this officially on consoles, and it stretches the lifespan of a game plenty of people have already finished several times over.
The timing helps as well. Console mod support arriving on the same day as a free upgrade means a returning player can rebuild the game before starting a new run, rather than discovering the option months later once the interest has faded. Mods hosted through mod.io are checked before they go live, which is the condition Sony and Microsoft set for this kind of feature on their machines.
Path tracing on PC and 90 frames per second on PS5 Pro
On the technical front, The Witcher 3 Remastered brings path tracing to PC, reworked textures and foliage, new lighting, and rebuilt animations for both Geralt and Roach. The PS5 Pro leans on PSSR to hit 60 frames per second with ray tracing switched on, or up to 90 in performance mode.
The Switch 2 version is the one to watch over the coming weeks, since it is the machine with the least headroom of the lot. Anyone who owns the original Switch release gets the remaster at no cost there too, and CD Projekt Red has said nothing yet about how the handheld mode holds up in the denser areas of Novigrad.
Those numbers go some way to explaining why so many players came back the same day. The argument over how much the upgrade actually changes started well before release, as the comparison clip that split the community made clear. With a launch peak like this one, players appear to have settled part of that question themselves.
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