The odds of Baldur’s Gate 3 being owned by The Pope just got better, as Larian’s head of publishing shouts out mods for helping it outdo numbers from last year

We all know Baldur’s Gate 3’s mods have proven pretty popular since official support for them was added by Larian with Patch 7. The developer’s gone out of its way to tell us just that, even letting us know just who we need to thank for contributing.

Anyway, now Larian’s publishing director has shared that embracing mods has actually led Larian in 2024 to be ahead of where it was at in terms of some player stats this time last year, when BG3 was about to head into a holiday season that’d see it start to mop up all the GOTY awards it ended up getting. Seriously, it even looks like there’s a chance The Pope’s just bought it to see what the ongoing fuss is about.

On Twitter, Michael Douse has shared some “fun data facts” he’s dug up while looking through Larian’s sales charts. “Our average daily peak concurrents are up 3% this year over last year” is the first one, “Our average daily active “users” are up 20% over last year” is the second, and “average daily Steam Deck users are up 61% over last year”.

The exec cites the first two specifically as being evidence that “mods are good”, which is a thing I’ve also been saying for a while now, in between trying to work out which of the over 1000 add-ons is stopping my copy of Skyrim from launching. In response, one user said they wish more developers would embrace modding like Larian has via the release of its toolkit and the bringing of BG3 mods to both PC and console. “They are likely scared that people will mod sex and therefore the ratings boards would chase them down and kill them in the night,” Douse replied.

Another interesting nugget which came out via this fresh batch of rare Douse tweets is that Baldur’s Gate 3 has now sold one more copy in the Vatican City. Yes, after he revealed last week that two copies of BG3 had been sold in the Vatican – the place where The Pope lives – with one additional wishlist, Douse is now reporting another sale has been made.

Naturally, Larian’s publishing director has immediately assumed this final copy has been bought by The Pope himself, because that’s funny. However, we here at VG247 are all about FACTS, as we’ve previously proven, so we’ve decided to try and calculate the odds that The Pope does actually own BG3.

As of 2023, the Vatican’s population is 764 people. Three copies of BG3 have been sold there. So, roughly 0.39% of the population of the Vatican are BG3 owners right now, meaning that’s the chance The Pope has of being one of the three. Unless my maths in wrong, and it’s last thing on a Monday right now, so there’s a good chance that’s the case. Sure, it’s not a big chance he owns it, but it’s better than nothing.

With what his holiness has tweeted about the New Orleans Saints recently, I’m pretty certain he’s got a good chance of being a Madden player too, so here’s hoping he can find ample time for both in between popely duties.