The Witcher 3 Breaks Its Steam Concurrent-Player Record 11 Years After Launch, Thanks to a Free Remaster
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05.10.2026 22:17
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2 min read
Over the first weekend of October 2026, the role-playing game The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt set an all-time record for concurrent players on Steam. According to SteamDB, the game peaked at 137,724 players. The previous high had stood since January 2020, when the first season of the Netflix series drove 103,000 users to play at the same time. The phenomenal surge of interest in an eleven-year-old game was triggered by the release of a major Remastered update.
Free DLC and Path Tracing
CD Projekt RED released the Remastered version on September 29 as a free upgrade for everyone who owned the original game. The developers did more than sharpen textures — they reworked the mechanics in depth: they refreshed Geralt’s combat animations, rebuilt the skill tree, expanded support for fan mods and added full Path Tracing on PC, as announced in the studio’s release post.
The decisive trigger for players’ return was the publisher’s generosity: the studio permanently unlocked the story expansions Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine for free, even for those who had bought only the base game. Steam also ran a 50% discount. Because the updated client uses the original app ID, all new and returning players were counted in the same stats as the classic The Witcher 3.
Technical Rough Edges and a Dip in Reviews
The triumphant return was not without technical problems. At launch, players ran into sharp frame-rate drops, cloud save sync errors and audio artifacts.
The developers had to rush out hotfix 5.00c, published on the game’s official website. In it, the studio rolled back changes to the HairWorks hair rendering technology that were causing severe FPS drops on a number of configurations. The issues showed up on a wide range of systems, prompting AMD to quickly release Adrenalin 26.9.2 as a fix.
Because of the optimization problems, recent user reviews on Steam over the past 30 days fell to 79% positive (the “Mostly Positive” category), though the game’s overall historical rating still sits at 95%. Despite the rough launch, the Polish studio pulled off a move rare for the industry: bringing a large-scale story-driven RPG back to life a decade later and surpassing its own peak popularity.
