Witcher 3 Remastered Player Count: Are Old Games Beating New Ones?

The Witcher 3 Remastered has set the game's all-time record for concurrent players on Steam: 137,000 people were playing the 2015 RPG at once on October 4. As of October 11, no paid release from late September and early October had reached a peak that high. The Witcher 3's record is 2.6 times the peak of Ace Combat 8 and more than four times that of Gears of War: E-Day. There were plenty of reasons to play besides the new graphics. Players who already owned the game on PC, PS5 or Xbox Series X|S got the remaster for free, along with both expansions. New players could buy it at half price for the first few days after launch, and Twitch viewers earned in-game rewards just for watching streams.

It can seem that a game matters only while it's new and then quietly fades into the bargain bin. Yet this fall, player counts for several games from earlier years climbed again on Steam, including The Outlast Trials, Valheim, ARC Raiders and Dragon's Dogma 2. And if a 2015 RPG can draw a higher Steam peak than the paid releases of late September and early October, who are new games really competing against?

Not everyone was happy with the remaster, though. In the first 13 days after its release, The Witcher 3 received more than 3,000 negative Steam reviews, and many older mods stopped working after the update. We examined the negative English-language reviews: bugs and performance drew more complaints than the lighting that dominated the headlines.

Let's look at what brought so many players back to The Witcher 3, why older games can still compete with new releases, and why the free update left some longtime owners frustrated.

The Witcher 3 Remastered isn't a new game but a major update to the existing one. On Steam, it uses the 2015 original's store page, which now carries the title The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered. CD Projekt RED announced the remaster on August 25 during Gamescom Opening Night Live, and it launched on September 29 on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S and Switch 2. Hungarian studio Yigsoft co-developed the remaster.

The most visible changes are new lighting and textures, plus path tracing on PC, which is the game's most realistic lighting mode and the most demanding on the GPU. Some of the new textures come from HD Reworked Project, the most popular mod for The Witcher 3.

The way you play has changed too. The skill tree has been reworked, so skill points are reset after switching to the remaster. Combat has new finishers, Geralt's horse Roach handles differently and you can now change the look of your gear. There are no new story quests, and Geralt's next adventure, the paid expansion Songs of the Past, is planned for 2027.

Anyone who owns The Witcher 3 on PC (Steam, GOG or the Epic Games Store), PS5 or Xbox Series X|S gets the remaster for free. PS4 owners get it on PS5 and Xbox One owners on Xbox Series X|S, while on the older consoles themselves, owners only get the expansions for free. In most regions, owners of the original Switch release can upgrade to the Switch 2 version at no extra cost. CD Projekt RED gave all owners both expansions, Hearts of Stone as well as Blood and Wine, on August 25, more than a month before launch. Steam's player counter shows what happened next.

The Witcher 3 broke its Steam concurrent-player record on September 29, the day the remaster launched. On October 4, it reached 137,000 concurrent players, according to SteamCharts — roughly a third above its previous peak.

The old record of 103,000 had stood since January 2020, when the Steam Winter Sale and the first season of Netflix's The Witcher renewed interest in the game. Even the free next-gen update in 2022 fell short. The remaster has now drawn more simultaneous Steam players than the original launch or any previous surge in popularity.

Steam tracks concurrent players, meaning how many people are playing a game at the same moment, and that is what The Witcher 3's record measures. It isn't the total number of players, because some people play in the morning and others at night. It isn't a sales figure either. Players on consoles, GOG and other PC stores aren't counted, but Steam players who rolled back to an older version of the game are. If you were playing an older version on Steam at that hour on Sunday, you were counted too.

There are probably at least as many players outside Steam as on it. Alinea Analytics estimated that on September 30, around 2.4 million people played The Witcher 3 on Steam, PlayStation and Xbox. That figure covers everyone who played at any point that day rather than all at once, and Steam accounted for less than half of them. There were new buyers, too. According to the same firm, the game sold about 130,000 copies across PC, PlayStation and Xbox on September 30, its best day since the summer of 2024, when it was on sale for $3.99. CD Projekt RED hasn't disclosed how many people are playing the remaster across all platforms. Whether 137,000 is a lot is easier to judge next to the new games that launched around the same time.

The remaster posted a higher Steam peak than all six notable paid releases from late September and early October. EA Sports FC 27 came closest, with around 96,000 concurrent players against The Witcher 3's 137,000. Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve, Control Resonant and Gears of War: E-Day peaked lower still, while Star Wars: Galactic Racer and Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival didn't reach 20,000.

These are each game's highest recorded player counts, not figures taken at the same time. FC 27 and Control Resonant set their records before the remaster launched, when The Witcher 3's numbers were much lower. We used both SteamCharts and SteamDB because SteamCharts had incomplete data for some of the new releases.

Steam alone doesn't tell the whole story, though. Gears of War: E-Day was also available on Xbox and through Game Pass at launch. As of October 9, Alinea estimated about 230,000 copies sold and roughly 1.7 million players through Game Pass, although Microsoft hasn't confirmed those figures. Ace Combat 8, meanwhile, had sold more than a million copies across all platforms by October 8, according to Bandai Namco — the fastest any entry in the series had reached that milestone.

The Witcher 3 also had a clear advantage: millions of existing owners could get the remaster without buying the game again. Its higher Steam peak doesn't mean the new releases flopped.

Nor did the remaster beat everything. The free-to-play MMO AION 2 peaked at around 398,000 concurrent Steam players, while multiplayer shooter WARDOGS reached nearly 429,000. Free-to-play Aniimo also came out ahead, with around 168,000 according to SteamCharts.

That was the picture as of October 11: the 2015 RPG beat the paid games released around the same time on peak Steam player counts, but trailed the biggest free-to-play and multiplayer titles. Some of the fall's most anticipated launches were still ahead. And several other older games saw their player counts surge this fall, even without a remaster.

Each of these comebacks had its own trigger, and most were also on sale. For each game, we compare, as of October 11, its SteamCharts peak in the calendar month before the event with its highest peak since the event began.

Of the other five games, only The Outlast Trials set an all-time record, and it did so during a sale. In relative terms, measured against the previous calendar month, The Witcher 3's player count grew the least, about fourfold, yet the game broke its own record 11 years after launch. How does a game this old manage it?

There are two easy ways to explain The Witcher 3's comeback. The first is nostalgia: the remaster simply reminded millions of people of a game they loved. The second is price: the update was free and the game was on sale. I think both miss the bigger picture. Older games already take up most of the playtime on Steam, and the remaster gave people a reason to return to one sitting in their library.

The numbers do show that older games take up most of the playtime on Steam. In its Steam Replay 2025 recap, Valve said games released that year accounted for 14% of all playtime, games one to seven years old for 44% and games at least eight years old for 40%. Newzoo's annual report, which covers 37 markets excluding China and India, found something similar: in 2025, more than half of playtime on PC, PlayStation and Xbox (54%) went to games at least six years old, and 66% on PC alone. In the first week of October, The Witcher 3 itself ranked just outside Steam's top 10 by peak concurrent players on SteamCharts. The games above it included Counter-Strike 2, which replaced 2012's CS:GO, and several titles more than five years old, such as Dota 2, PUBG, Apex Legends and Rust. Open your Steam library and look at what you played this week. How many of those games came out this year? So a remaster doesn't have to steal players from new releases: on Steam, people already spend most of their time in older games.

A big new release costs 70, and you don't know whether you'll like it. An old one is a different story. The Witcher 3 has sold more than 65 million copies (as of late May 2026), and longtime owners were coming back to a game they already knew. Owners on PC and current-generation consoles got the remaster for free, while new players could buy it for $25 in the first few days. And with outlets covering the remaster, videos getting millions of views and Twitch handing out rewards to stream viewers, an old game is back in the spotlight for a few weeks.

Still, a free update isn't enough by itself, as The Witcher 3's own history shows. The 2022 next-gen update was also free for every owner, but the game peaked at 89,259 concurrent players, short of the record. This time, owners also got both expansions for free. Player counts alone can't tell us what mattered most: the update, the free expansions, the discount or the hype around the launch.

Other games have seen similar spikes before. Cyberpunk 2077's peak player count jumped from 18,700 to 136,700 in September 2022 after the release of the anime Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and a major patch. In April 2024, after Amazon's Fallout TV series premiered and a free next-gen update arrived, Fallout 4's peak climbed from 25,600 in March to 186,700, according to SteamCharts. Both games had also been discounted around then (Fallout 4 was 75% off until April 19), so the effects of the show, the update and the discount are hard to separate.

But a big event doesn't always bring players back. Fallout 4's paid Anniversary Edition arrived in November 2025 alongside a free mandatory patch for all owners. The game's peak player count didn't rise, and that month its Recent Reviews score on Steam fell to 33% positive, with players complaining that the patch broke mods and that the game crashed. Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered peaked at about 2,500 concurrent players on Steam on launch day, roughly as many as the original was drawing at the time. In both cases, the paid re-release didn't lift player counts. But there's an exception: The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered, also a paid release, peaked at more than 180,000 concurrent players on Steam on its April 2025 launch day, according to SteamDB. A spike can also fade fast, as it did for Half-Life 2. For its 20th anniversary in November 2024, Valve released a big free update and made the game free to claim for a limited time. It hit 64,000 concurrent players, its highest since SteamCharts began tracking, and within a month, it had lost almost three-quarters of that peak.

Mods are another reason older games last so long. The remaster, however, managed to energize modders and break many older mods at the same time.

The Witcher 3 has around 10,000 mods on Nexus Mods, one of the biggest mod sites. The remaster triggered a surge in modding. By our count, based on Nexus Mods data, 975 new mods were uploaded in the 13 days after launch, almost as many as in all of 2025, when 1,083 were released. Mod authors also updated 590 older mods. The widely cited figure of more than 450 mods in two days comes from a personal count by PC Gamer's Wes Fenlon, who added up new and updated mods.

The game's most popular mod, HD Reworked Project (HDRP), has become obsolete. Its author, HalkHogan, teamed up with CD Projekt RED on the remaster, and the mod's improvements are now built into the game. "HDRP will no longer be needed," HalkHogan wrote on Nexus Mods back in August, as PC Gamer reported. Three more of the 10 most downloaded mods are now fully or partly redundant, because the base game now includes their weight-limit and durability changes and some of their quest-marker tweaks.

Older mods were expected to break. CD Projekt RED warned that mods containing XML files, scripts or w3strings files (which store the game's text) wouldn't work after the remaster update. According to modders, the game's script and XML files were also converted from UTF-16 to UTF-8. Script Merger, the tool that combines conflicting mods so they can run together, broke too. A day after the remaster launched, modder relapse12 released a new tool based on Script Merger, calling the situation a "modpocalypse." By October 11, the new tool had been downloaded 52,000 times. As of the same date, only one of the 10 most downloaded Witcher 3 mods had been updated for the remaster, so check each mod for the "Remastered Compatible" tag before installing it.

The biggest new feature for modders is mod support on consoles. On PS5, Xbox Series X|S and Switch 2, you can install mods via mod.io straight from the game's menu. As of September 30, TheGamer counted 105 console mods: 44 on PS5, 17 on Xbox and 88 on Switch 2, with many available on more than one platform. Most are small tweaks and new character looks, and console players pay for that freedom: modded saves can't earn trophies or achievements. For step-by-step instructions on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, see the guide to installing mods in The Witcher 3 Remastered.

Mods often break after big updates. When Fallout 4's next-gen update landed in April 2024, it broke F4SE, the script extender many mods depend on. A downgrader tool showed up on Nexus Mods two days later, and an updated F4SE arrived as a test build six days after the game update and as a main release eight days after it. After Cyberpunk 2077's 2.0 update in 2023, CD Projekt RED itself recommended removing older mods. Still, the studio remains mod-friendly: it built popular fan mods into The Witcher 3 in 2022 and again in 2026, and it updated its REDkit modding tool on the remaster's launch day. Nexus Mods is also running a modding contest for the remaster through November 30, with a £3,000 prize pool. Broken mods matter mostly to the people who use them. So what were other players complaining about?

On launch day, owners of AMD graphics cards saw trees vanish and water flicker until AMD released a new driver later that day. For some players, turning on NVIDIA HairWorks for hair and fur caused a sharp drop in performance. And on PC, some players couldn't save if the path to their Documents folder contained special characters, such as Cyrillic letters in the Windows username. A patch on October 1 fixed the save bug and the HairWorks slowdown.

Critics liked the remaster, with the PC version holding a 92 on Metacritic as of October 11 and IGN calling it the best version of the game yet. Players are more divided. In its first 13 days, the remaster got 3,352 negative Steam reviews. Before launch, the game had been getting about four negative reviews a day. On launch day, nearly one in three reviews was negative, and on September 30, the share hit 35.9%. The game's overall Steam rating barely moved, staying at 96% positive, because it has collected more than 900,000 reviews over 11 years.

At first glance, it looked like players were protesting the new lighting, which had been debated since the first previews. The reviews themselves don't support that. By our count, half of the people who wrote negative English-language reviews have now logged more than 50 hours in the game, so many of the critics were longtime players. We sorted all 1,097 negative English-language reviews posted from September 29 to October 11 into rough topic groups. More than a third complained about bugs or called the game broken, and about a quarter mentioned performance. Four topics followed, each showing up in roughly one in six to one in eight reviews: rolling back to the old version and save files; AMD GPUs; changes to combat and skills; and crashes. Lighting and the washed-out look (bloom, fog, colors) came up about as often, in roughly one review in eight, while price came up in 2% of them. Nor was it review bombing in Steam's sense: Steam flags "off-topic review activity" when a game gets flooded with reviews that aren't about the game itself, and it didn't flag any for The Witcher 3 in 2026.

The idea that the remaster runs worse for everyone doesn't hold up either. In TechSpot's tests on two high-end graphics cards at 4K with medium settings, it ran 36–45% faster than the previous version. On PC, the problems showed up at maximum settings and with path tracing turned on, as well as on AMD cards before the driver update. On consoles, CD Projekt RED has promised further performance improvements, particularly on PS5.

The lighting debate, however, didn't die down. Even before launch, players criticized the colors and fog in a work-in-progress comparison that CD Projekt RED shared, but a Reddit post that called the new lighting a downgrade was mostly downvoted. The day before launch, PC Gamer news writer Joshua Wolens wrote: "More than anything else, it's the lighting that keeps stopping me in my tracks, particularly around sunset and sunrise." After release, Kotaku's Ethan Gach was more mixed, writing: "So far, I definitely think some of the old art direction and magic is lost in the remastered version, but it's not as obvious in the moment when I'm playing." Eurogamer named bloom as the likely main culprit behind the washed-out look. PC players could turn it off from day one, but console players couldn't at launch. According to the same outlet, positive posts about the graphics were at least as common as negative ones.

On October 1, CD Projekt RED community director Marcin Momot wrote on X about the bloom fix: "We're hoping to have the changes ready for the next update but no details yet." A week later, the studio released patch 5.01, which tweaked the lighting and added a bloom toggle on PS5 and Xbox (a separate patch for Switch 2 is still in development). And a side-by-side comparison from the YouTube channel Comparaholic had reached 2.3 million views by October 11. Other players were less upset about how the remaster looks than about what it replaced.

On PC and current-generation consoles, the remaster automatically replaced the old version, which is no longer sold on its own. On Reddit, one player wrote that they hadn't asked for the update and that it replaced the version they'd bought and liked. Another player in the same thread pointed out that rolling back on Steam takes three clicks. That's true: in the game's Steam properties, the Game Versions & Betas section offers classic version 1.32 and, according to CD Projekt RED, version 4.04 from the 2022 next-gen branch. You can roll back on GOG as well, but not on the Epic Games Store, and there's no official way to do it on consoles. Players report that saves from the remaster don't work in older versions.

At full price, the game now costs new buyers more. Before the announcement, Steam sold the base game for $39.99 and the Complete Edition with both expansions for $49.99. Shortly after the announcement, by August 27, the base game was gone from Steam, leaving only the Complete Edition, which was renamed "Remastered" on September 29. You can no longer buy the game without the expansions, so new players pay $10 more at full price, but Hearts of Stone as well as Blood and Wine now come included. CD Projekt RED hasn't explained the price change, but on paper, there's little to complain about: the extra $10 buys new players two expansions that longtime owners who didn't have them got for free.

The system requirements went up too. The minimum specs now call for Windows 11, a GTX 1660-class GPU, 12 GB of RAM and 60 GB of SSD space (95 GB on the Epic Games Store), while in 2015, a GTX 660 and 6 GB of RAM were enough. CD Projekt RED says it chose the GTX 1660 as the minimum because NVIDIA has ended Game Ready driver support for its older Maxwell, Pascal and Volta GPUs. Those include the GTX 900 and GTX 10 series, so if you have one of those cards, even a high-end one, it's no longer covered by the official requirements. The game is no longer tested on Windows 10. According to the studio, that doesn't mean it will stop running there, but compatibility isn't guaranteed. "I just can't update the game because of the old computer," Nexus Mods user Sorceress111 wrote.

Gaming has seen truly bad remasters before. Warcraft III: Reforged launched in 2020 without some of the improvements Blizzard had promised. It also replaced the classic game for every owner and removed some features in the process. Metacritic users gave it 0.6 out of 10, and Blizzard loosened its refund rules. Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy — The Definitive Edition launched in 2021 full of bugs. Rockstar apologized and, through the end of June 2022, gave the classic versions for free to everyone who bought the remaster on PC from its own store.

On the other hand, a remake can pay off. The Resident Evil 2 remake had sold 19.7 million copies as of June 2026, compared with almost 5 million for the 1998 original on PlayStation. For more examples on both sides, see the list of the best video game remakes and remasters and the list of the most pointless remasters and remakes.

The closest comparison is The Witcher 3's own 2022 update, which was also free, drew the same complaints about performance and crashes and got a hotfix five days later. But in all of December 2022, the month of that update, the game got 2,726 negative reviews, versus 3,352 for the remaster in its first 13 days. After two patches, though, the share of negative reviews more than halved, from 33% in the first two days to 13% on October 9–11. Whether players stick around will become clear soon.

On the remaster's third weekend, October 17–18, daily Steam peaks ranged from roughly 87,000 to 97,000 players. Those numbers were down from the previous weekend, but the game continued to draw a large audience after the launch discount ended. If you've already finished another playthrough, see our list of games like The Witcher 3.

A few upcoming events could affect player counts. Twitch Drops for The Witcher 3 run through October 27. On November 5, a remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time launches on Switch 2, and the debate over how to update a classic may move on to that game. On November 19, GTA 6 arrives on consoles. Songs of the Past, the game's first story expansion since 2016, is planned for 2027, and CD Projekt RED is still targeting 2028 for The Witcher 4. Whatever those events bring, the first two weeks have already shown that an old game can hold its own against paid new releases on Steam.

As of October 11, The Witcher 3 Remastered had a higher peak concurrent player count on Steam than any paid release from late September and early October, and it broke the game's own all-time record 11 years after launch. The new graphics were just one reason: millions of owners got the remaster for free, new players bought it at a discount with both expansions included, and gaming outlets and streamers covered it widely. For some players, the remaster brought bugs, arguments over the lighting and an unrequested replacement of the old version, though after two patches, the share of negative reviews fell from 33% to 13%.

People buy a new game without knowing whether they'll like it, but they come back to an old one already knowing the answer. I wouldn't write off new releases just yet: it's too early to judge them by Steam's counter alone. But if a 2015 game can draw a higher Steam peak than the paid releases of the same weeks, maybe new games' biggest rival is the one already sitting in players' libraries?

Yes, if you own the game on PC, PS5 or Xbox Series X|S. On PC, that includes copies from Steam, GOG and the Epic Games Store. PS4 owners get the remaster on PS5, and Xbox One owners get it on Xbox Series X|S. On the older consoles themselves, only the two expansions are free. In most regions, owners of the original Switch release can upgrade to the Switch 2 version at no extra cost. New players pay $49.99 on Steam, with both expansions included.

Owners on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S get it for free. New players pay $49.99 on Steam, a price that includes both expansions, Hearts of Stone as well as Blood and Wine. On Steam, the standalone base game, which used to cost $39.99, is no longer sold. At launch, the remaster was 50% off on Steam, at $24.99.

The remaster adds new lighting, textures and models, new ray-traced effects (plus path tracing on PC) and support for DLSS 4.5 and FSR 4. CD Projekt RED also reworked the skill tree and combat, added a way to change the look of your gear, expanded photo mode and brought mod support to consoles. There are no new story quests yet; those are planned for 2027 in the paid Songs of the Past expansion. The full list is in the guide to all changes in The Witcher 3 Remastered.

Not all of them. According to CD Projekt RED, mods that include XML files, scripts or w3strings files won't work until their authors update them. Some texture mods still work without an update. On Nexus Mods, authors and site volunteers mark compatible mods with the "Remastered Compatible" tag, and nearly 1,900 had it as of October 11.

The minimum PC specs are Windows 11, an Intel Core i5-8400 or AMD Ryzen 5 2600, 12 GB of RAM, a GeForce GTX 1660, Radeon RX 5500 XT 8 GB or Arc A580, plus at least 6 GB of VRAM and 60 GB of SSD space (95 GB on the Epic Games Store). DirectX 11 mode has been removed, so the game now requires DirectX 12. For maxed-out settings with path tracing at 4K, CD Projekt RED lists an RTX 5080-class card, and that target assumes DLSS and frame generation are turned on. The game is no longer tested on Windows 10. The studio says that doesn't mean it will stop running there, but compatibility isn't guaranteed.

In the first days after launch, PC players couldn't save or load games if the path to their Documents folder contained special characters, such as Cyrillic letters in the Windows username. CD Projekt RED advised using a path with Latin characters only and fixed the bug with patch 5.00c on October 1. Patch 5.01 on October 8 fixed another bug that could affect save data. Old saves work in the remaster, but skill points are reset, so you'll need to spend them again.

On Steam, open the game's Properties, go to Game Versions & Betas and select classic version 1.32. According to CD Projekt RED, the same section also offers version 4.04 from the 2022 next-gen branch. You can roll back on GOG Galaxy too. Rolling back isn't possible on the Epic Games Store, and there's no official way to do it on consoles. Players report that saves from the remaster don't work in older versions. For step-by-step instructions, see the guide to downgrading The Witcher 3 Remastered.