Quen it rains...

Player numbers are still rising for The Witcher 3 following the release of the Remastered edition upgrade last week, as people not only return to the game following its overhaul but also buy it for the first time, or again.

Over the weekend - specifically yesterday, Sunday 4th October at 4pm BST, according to SteamDB - The Witcher 3 set a new Steam concurrent player record of 137,724. That's a nearly 20K improvement over the game's previous high of 120K players.

For reference: The Witcher 3 attracted 92K concurrent players when it launched in 2015, and had a previous peak of 103K in January 2020, when The Witcher Netflix show was popular. This is good news for game-maker CD Projekt Red, of course, which is seeing first-hand how much pulling power its fantasy game still has, ahead of its new Witcher 3 expansion Songs of the Past arriving next year at some point.

These numbers don't include console players, either, meaning total player-numbers across PlayStation, Xbox and Switch are presumably much higher. How much higher, we don't know officially, though Alinea Analytics has provided some guidance. Last week, a day after the Remastered edition's release, Alinea analyst Rhys Elliott said The Witcher 3 spiked at 2.4 million daily active users across PC, PlayStation and Xbox (Switch wasn't included for some reason).

"Perhaps even more impressively," Elliott added, "The Witcher 3 sold another 130K copies across those three platforms YESTERDAY [30th September], the most it's sold in a day since The Witcher 3's first $3.99 Steam discount price back in summer 2024. It's currently on sale for $24.99 across all three platforms I'm covering here. Almost $3M in revenue!"

As Elliott noted, that puts Witcher 3 lifetime sales over 66m copies now. "What a run," Elliott said.

The Witcher 3 - Remastered is a significant, free overhaul of the existing game that not only modernises the graphical look of the game, right down to its textures, but also improves animations and reworks the game's skills and skill tree. The Witcher 3 - Remastered is, as I wrote last week, an extraordinarily generous offering, though there are teething problems surrounding lighting and other issues that CD Projekt Red is rolling hotfixes out for.

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