From Steam’s self-published stats.
Baldur’s Gate 3 could not be preloaded and weighed in at 125 gigabytes on disk, so when the game left Early Access at 11am US Eastern yesterday, Steam’s bandwidth utilization shot up 8x over a span of 30 minutes. I know personally, I saw my download hit over 600 Mbps across a 1 Gbps fiber connection.
Kudos to the system engineers at Valve. It is mind-boggling that they have built infrastructure that robust.
Lots of people are probably waiting until the weekend
Exactly my case, downloaded yesterday so I can play all weekend. Don’t have but an hour to play during the work week. Definitely not starting this game with just an hour.
Get your character created in that hour so you can just jump in later!