Hogwarts Legacy drops to $5.99 on Steam, DLSS 5 update set for November 5

Hogwarts Legacy costs $5.99 on Steam instead of $59.99 until October 22, a 90% discount that is part of the WB Games Publisher Sale. At the same time, the 2023 action RPG from Avalanche Software and Warner Bros. Games has climbed Steam's most played chart: on October 18 it ranked 97th with a daily peak of 20,821 concurrent players, up 43 places from 140th a week earlier.

The price is not a first. Notebookcheck already reported $6 as the game's lowest price to date, and the official Steam community hub lists earlier discounts that ran through September 3 and through October 8. According to the Steam sale page, the current offer runs through October 22 at 10am PDT.

DLSS 5 arrives on November 5

The bigger change for PC players is technical. According to heise, Hogwarts Legacy will receive an update on November 5 that adds Nvidia's DLSS 5 AI rendering. heise describes it as the second game to officially support Neural Rendering, which revises lighting and materials using a generative AI model. Citing a statement from Nvidia, heise adds that Avalanche Software is also bringing the game's other DLSS techniques up to date with the same update.

Hardware is the catch. DLSS 5 officially runs on GeForce RTX 50 series cards, on laptops with Nvidia's ARM processor RTX Spark and in cloud gaming. Nvidia gives no date for the RTX 40 series in its current announcement.

The game has a history with the feature: heise notes that Hogwarts Legacy was one of the games Nvidia used to first present DLSS 5 at GTC in March. PC Gamer's headline says the developers have been listening to PC players about keeping the effect away from game characters. Looking at the new images, PC Gamer finds the effect is "almost entirely one of environmental lighting and materials" and writes that the devs have "pulled those sliders back a whole lot", if not masked off character faces entirely.

Reactions to DLSS 5

Not everyone is waiting for it. IGN, in a piece carried on Steam News, says DLSS 5 comes with "a newer, faster model", but headlines that "Some Fans Can't Tell the Difference". PC Gamer says its readers "are yet to be convinced", citing its own poll. PCGH points out that the computing load of DLSS 5 remains high and that independent comparisons with the previous version are still missing.

On the Steam community hub, one user wrote "Not at 90% off, not at 99% off." Another, returning player asked whether performance is better than it was back then. The overall Steam verdict remains strong: 89% of 376,132 user reviews are positive, which Steam rates as Very Positive.

There is also a sequel on the horizon. As 80.lv reports, Warner Bros. confirmed a "second installment" of Hogwarts Legacy in a shareholder letter tied to Q2 2026, published on August 6. Avalanche has not said anything about it so far, and a launch date is unknown.

For anyone who has not played it, $5.99 is the price to watch until October 22 at 10am PDT. Owners of an RTX 50 card can try DLSS 5 from November 5; for the RTX 40 series, Nvidia has not given a date.