A 97% review score, 49,000 players online right now, and a price tag that just hit its all-time low. Baldur’s Gate 3 is not a new release. It came out in August 2023. And it is currently outselling most of the games that launched this month.

Steam’s Spring Sale 2026, running March 19–26, has discounted thousands of titles across the platform. But the real story isn’t the sheer volume of deals — it’s which games are actually moving units. Four titles with a combined 1.57 million user reviews are simultaneously charting in both the Top Sellers and Specials lists, effectively walling off newer, less-proven games from the positions that matter most.

The Anchor: Baldur’s Gate 3 at $44.99

Larian Studios’ RPG is sitting at #7 on Top Sellers and #6 on Specials with a 25% discount — its first significant price cut in over a year. At $44.99, it’s the highest-rated game on the entire Steam chart right now, carrying a Metacritic score of 96 and a 97% positive rating from nearly 491,000 user reviews. That’s not a typo. Almost half a million people reviewed this game, and 475,000 of them said yes.

The 49,311 concurrent players are particularly telling. Patch 8, which added cross-play, 12 new subclasses, and a photo mode, has kept the community active well into the game’s third year. For a single-player RPG with no live-service hooks, that kind of staying power is abnormal. A 25% discount on a game this well-regarded doesn’t need to compete — it just needs to show up.

The Comeback: Cyberpunk 2077 at $20.99

CD Projekt Red’s open-world RPG has the deepest percentage cut of the four premium titles at 65% off, dropping it to $20.99. It’s charting at #6 on Top Sellers and #4 on Specials, which would have been unthinkable at launch.

Cyberpunk 2077’s December 2020 debut was one of the most catastrophic in modern gaming — broken on last-gen consoles, pulled from the PlayStation Store, refunds issued en masse. Five years and a complete overhaul later, the game carries an 88% positive rating from nearly 395,000 reviews. The 2.0 update rebuilt its skill trees and combat systems from scratch, and the Phantom Liberty expansion sealed what PC Gamer called “one of the greatest redemption arcs in gaming history.” With 25,265 concurrent players during the sale, it’s clear the audience has moved past the launch debacle. At twenty bucks, the value proposition borders on absurd.

The Evergreen: Elden Ring at $38.99

FromSoftware’s open-world action RPG is discounted 35% to $38.99, holding #9 on Top Sellers and #7 on Specials. Elden Ring’s numbers are staggering in their own right: 556,097 user reviews with a 94% positive rate and a Metacritic score of 94. It has more reviews than any other game on this list.

Three years after release, 27,172 players were online at the time of writing. FromSoftware titles tend to maintain long tails thanks to their punishing difficulty and deep build variety, but Elden Ring’s scale — an open world layered over the studio’s signature combat — gave it a broader audience than any Souls game before it. The Shadow of the Erdtree expansion, released last year, added another reason for lapsed players to return. At 35% off, it’s the smallest discount of the four, but FromSoftware has never been a studio that races to the bottom on price.

The Sleeper Cut: Sons of the Forest at $8.69

Endnight Games’ survival horror title is the outlier here — smaller studio, lower base price, and a 70% discount that drops it to $8.69. But the chart positions tell the story: #8 on Top Sellers and #2 on Specials, meaning it’s the second-most-purchased discounted game on all of Steam right now.

Sons of the Forest carries an 88% positive rating from 126,530 reviews and had 13,405 concurrent players at the time of writing. For an indie survival game priced under nine dollars, those are franchise numbers. The co-op appeal is a significant driver — this is the kind of game where one person buys it on sale and three friends follow.

The Bigger Picture

Add the numbers up and these four games account for over 115,000 concurrent players and roughly 1.57 million user reviews between them. Every one of them launched at least a year ago. Every one of them is charting above games that released in 2026.

This is part of a broader pattern visible across this sale. As we noted in our earlier coverage, even Stardew Valley — a game approaching its tenth anniversary — is riding the Spring Sale wave. The throughline is the same: proven games with massive review counts and established reputations don’t just survive sale events. They dominate them. The discount draws attention, the review score closes the deal, and newer titles without that track record get squeezed to the margins.

For players, this is straightforward good news — four excellent games, all under $45, all battle-tested by hundreds of thousands of players. For developers launching new titles into a sale window, the math is less encouraging. When a $45 game has a 97% approval rating from half a million reviewers, “new” is not a competitive advantage. Proven is.

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