On 4 October 2026, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered reached 137,724 concurrent players on Steam. SteamDB reported the number as a first — “The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered has reached 137,724 concurrent players on Steam for the first time (95.11% rating)” — and its charts page dates the all-time peak to 4 October 2026. Four days later, CD PROJEKT RED published Patch 5.01, a maintenance update that changes Dynamic Resolution Scaling to off by default on PC and adds Bloom, Light Shafts and Depth of Field options to the console builds.
What changed: The Witcher 3 set a new all-time Steam concurrent peak of 137,724 on 4 October 2026, then received Patch 5.01 on 8 October. Why it matters: An eleven-year-old single-player RPGRPG. Role-Playing Game — a game built around character progression, story, and player choices. beat its own 2020 record, and the patch that followed moves graphics defaults rather than adding content. Who should care: PC players who relied on the old Dynamic Resolution Scaling default, console players waiting on performance fixes, and anyone reading the number as a signal about CD PROJEKT RED’s release slate.
What the record actually says
The 137,724 figure is an all-time peak, not a launch-day spike. Tracker Network’s Steam-only population page, which says it has tracked the app for “4,176 days of data” since May 2015, lists the same 137,724 as both its all-time peak and its 30-day peak, with a 30-day average of 43,143 concurrent players. SteamDB’s charts page confirms the date and, in its store data, places the game at number 23 in daily active users on Steam.
Two details shape how that number should be read. First, it counts Steam alone. Tracker Network states plainly that its figures “only account for Steam players”, so GOG, the Epic Games Store, Battle.net, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch 2 sit outside it. Second, a concurrent peak is a single moment, not a total owner count or a daily average. The surrounding months show how unusual the peak is.
| Month | Peak concurrent players (Steam) |
|---|---|
| October 2026 (all-time peak, 4 Oct) | 137,724 |
| September 2026 | 120,975 |
| August 2026 | 31,880 |
| July 2026 | 36,722 |
| June 2026 | 35,158 |
Those monthly figures come from the same Tracker Network page. They are worth keeping next to the headline: the game’s August 2026 peak sat under 32,000, and the record is more than four times that.
From launch day to the record
The remaster went live on 29 September 2026 as a free upgrade. GamesRadar+ wrote on launch day that it was “available as a free update to anyone who already owned the base game”, and noted that the concurrent count had already passed the game’s previous record within hours. GameSpot put the launch peak at 120,975, beating the January 2020 mark of 103,329 set when the first season of the Netflix series sent players back to the game. GamesRadar+ records the original 2015 launch month at over 92,000 concurrent players.
The all-time record did not arrive on day one. It landed on 4 October, after the first weekend, which is the pattern the trackers show: launch day reset the record, and the following days pushed it higher. CD PROJEKT RED marked the launch on the official Witcher account, writing that “more witchers are now walking the Path across the Continent than ever before” and thanking players for their trust, as quoted by GameSpot.
Why a 2015 game peaked in 2026
Two structural facts explain most of the surge, and both appear in the sources. Neither SteamDB nor CD PROJEKT RED attributes the peak to a single cause, so this article does not either.
The first is the price of entry for people who already owned the game. The remaster is a free upgrade for owners on the platforms covered, and the launch platforms listed in the patch notes span PC stores Steam, GOG, the Epic Games Store, Battle.net and Xbox Play Anywhere, plus PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. GameSpot reports that the game had lifetime sales of 65 million units globally as of May 2026 and “has been regularly discounted”. A large installed base plus a zero-cost download is the simplest explanation on offer; whether returning veterans or first-time players drove the peak is something CD PROJEKT RED has not broken down.
The second is the release calendar around it. GameSpot notes the game was reaching those numbers in a crowded stretch, with Onimusha: Way of the Sword, Control Resonant, Marvel’s Wolverine and Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave landing within weeks of one another as publishers moved away from GTA 6’s November window. A record set in a quiet month would say less about the remaster; one set in that month says more.
Patch 5.01: what actually changed
Patch 5.01 arrived on 8 October, four days after the peak, and it reads as a maintenance pass rather than a feature drop. The notes group the changes under Gameplay, UI, PC-specific, Consoles and Other. The headline change is a default, not a feature.
| Area | Change in Patch 5.01 |
|---|---|
| PC defaults | Default Dynamic Resolution Scaling setting changed to OFF |
| PC graphics | GTAO Quality reset after restart fixed; DRS setting display after Anti-Aliasing changes fixed; graphics settings locked on unsupported GPUs; wrong-GPUGPU. Graphics Processing Unit — the chip that renders the game's visuals; the main driver of framerate and image quality. selection fixed |
| Consoles | Bloom, Light Shafts and Depth of Field added to graphics options; PS5 settings no longer reset on every launch; incorrect frame-rate limits in graphics modes fixed on base PS5; Ukrainian text localization available in all regions |
| Gameplay | “Automatically Apply Blade Oils” fixed; boats moving uncontrollably fixed; ladder animations improved; delayed dodge response fixed; Exploding Shield gained damage reflection; Synergy skill values corrected |
| Saves | A fix that could affect save file data, plus measures for saves that may already have been affected |
| Visuals | Adjustments to Bloom, tone mapping, character lighting, Ray Tracingray tracing. A rendering technique that simulates how light bounces, for realistic shadows, reflections, and lighting — costly to compute. and Path Tracing |
| Other | Dynamic Resolution Scaling visual artifacts fixed; foliage collision fixed; consent screen returns after backend issues |
The Dynamic Resolution Scaling change deserves a note on its own, because it is a default flip and not a removal. The same patch also fixes an issue where DRS could display the wrong setting after changing the Anti-Aliasing mode, and fixes a case where DRS could cause visual artifacts in certain configurations. Read together, 5.01 leaves the feature available while making the safer state the starting point on PC. Players who were relying on the previous default should check the setting after updating.
The Gameplay list is a set of long-tail irritations rather than a rebalance: a dodge that could respond late, a bomb that could still be thrown when the option was disabled, stamina fully draining when sprinting and dodging at once. Combat skills get two small touches — damage reflection added to Exploding Shield, and corrected values on the Synergy skill’s bonus. The save-data fix is the one item here with consequences beyond a session, since the notes say it addresses saves that may already have been affected and adds measures to prevent further damage.
The console side is still catching up
The Consoles section adds three graphics options PC players have had all along — Bloom, Light Shafts and Depth of Field — and fixes a PlayStation 5 annoyance that made the patch worth its download on its own: settings that reset every time the game was launched. It also corrects frame-rate limits in different graphics modes on the base PlayStation 5, and makes Ukrainian text localization available in all regions.
The patch notes also confirm a Switch 2 update is in progress, described as “introducing closer parity between all versions of the game, including the same global changes as on other platforms”, alongside Switch 2-specific work on image clarity and sharpness. No date is attached; the notes say only that more information will follow “in the following days”. Until that build ships, the console and handheld versions lag the PC one on both the new options and the fixes in this patch.
What the record does and does not measure
It is worth separating three things that are easy to blur together. The 137,724 peak measures simultaneous Steam players at one moment on 4 October. SteamDB’s own store page rates the game “Overwhelmingly Positive” at a 95.08% SteamDB rating across 915,855 reviews — a snapshot of the review base, not part of the player-count record. And Patch 5.01 came after the peak, so the patch cannot explain the record; if anything, the sequence runs the other way, with CD PROJEKT RED shipping follow-up work once the surge was already under way.
The record also does not tell us how many people played across PlayStation, Xbox, GOG, Epic, Battle.net or Switch 2. Tracker Network is explicit that its number is Steam-only, and no console figure has been published alongside it. What the peak does establish is narrower and still notable: the installed base on a single storefront was large enough, and willing enough, to push an eleven-year-old RPG past its own lockdown-era high.
What comes next
GameSpot reports that The Witcher 3 is set to receive a new expansion in 2027, Songs of the Past, and that The Witcher 4 could arrive as soon as 2028. For readers tracking the studio’s pipeline, The Witcher IV: Ciri as Lead on Unreal Engine 5 covers the next mainline entry, while Cyberpunk 2 Orion: 163 Devs and Unreal Engine 5 covers CD PROJEKT RED’s other active project. Both matter here for the same reason the record does: a zero-cost remaster keeps a dormant brand in front of a very large audience while the paid releases are still years out.