The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt released in 2015 and its last major expansion followed in May of 2016, but this week the game has seen its highest player count since launch, likely due to Netflix's debut of The Witcher season one.
According to SteamDB, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt currently has over 66,000 active players, a number that surpasses the game's popularity even from the time of its second major expansion, the vampire-focused Blood and Wine. At the time of that DLC launch, The Witcher 3 peaked with over 53,000 players. That means this week's surge is actually the highest since launch when the game soared to a concurrent player count of 92,268.
It's not just the series' latest and greatest entry boasting a resurgence either. The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings is fast approaching 5,000 active players this week, a number which dwarves the average of the past four years of around 1,500 players. For The Witcher 2, the series hasn't been this popular since the time of its trilogy-closing follow-up arrived in May of 2015, at which point it climbed all the way to 12,883 players.
Even the series' debut game, which is a bit rough around the edges for many modern players, has seen a spike in playtime. SteamDB says the game has over 8,000 active players currently, which is the highest total since -- you guessed it -- May of 2015. Its current exact figure of 8,204 players is just shy of the game's totals from a few days before The Wild Hunt's launch when it reached numbers of 8,337 players.
In total, it seems The Witcher has been reborn on Steam, and though we don't have access to the series' exact figures on other platforms, one can reasonably assume they're seeing surges all across platforms, as evidenced by its reappearance on the Xbox Gameplay Chart shared weekly by TrueAchievements. The game landed at number 27 of the top 40 list this past week, after not charting for many months before. The same can likely be said for Andrzej Sapkowski's books which birthed Geralt of Rivia and his monster hunting adventures long before CD Projekt Red or Netflix got to work with the IP. There's no confirmation of a new Witcher game, though the studio has remained open to the idea. The Netflix drama starrring Henry Cavill, meanwhile, has already been greenlit for a second season. Its first season, told in eight episodes, is now streaming on the platform.
