That's quite a turnaround.
Nearly two years after its troubled release, Cyberpunk 2077 may finally be hitting its stride: CD Projekt said that the game has drawn in more than a million players, “new and returning,” every day this week.
“Each day of this week Night City has been visited by 1 million players, both new and returning,” the Cyberpunk 2077 Twitter account revealed. “We wanted to use this opportunity to thank you for being with us and playing the game. Thanks, Chooms!”
Each day of this week Night City has been visited by 1 million players, both new and returning. We wanted to use this opportunity to thank you for being with us and playing the game. Thanks, Chooms! 💛 pic.twitter.com/zqggblztF8September 21, 2022
Those are clearly multiplatform numbers, but Cyberpunk 2077 is also seeing a real uptick in numbers on Steam specifically. According to Steamcharts, Cyberpunk’s average concurrent player count has more than doubled over the past month, from 10,411 in August to 22,911 through the last 30 days. The peak concurrent player count is up even higher, from 18,695 in August to 89,387 over the past 30 days.
That’s a far cry from the eye-watering player counts at launch—the average concurrent player count in December 2020 on PC was 332,395, and it peaked at over 830,000—but still represents Cyberpunk 2077’s best performance since February 2021, a point at which the true extent of the Cyberpunk debacle had fully sunk in. (In case you’d forgotten, Sony took the extraordinary step of removing the game from the PlayStation Store two months earlier because it was such a five-alarm mess. It took a full six months before it was allowed back in.)
Cyberpunk 2077’s player numbers first began climbing upward in early September, coinciding with the debut of the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners anime on Netflix. Edgerunners was an immediate hit with critics and viewers alike: Our own Wes Fenlon described it as “a surprisingly compelling gutter-level view of Night City” and said it made him want to give the game another shot. Clearly, he wasn’t alone in that feeling.
This isn’t the first time a CD Projekt game has benefitted from a Netflix spinoff: In January 2020, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt broke 100,000 concurrent players on Steam for the first time ever—nearly five full years after it launched—thanks primarily to the success of The Witcher series on Netflix, which had debuted the previous month.
Of course, Netflix isn’t the only reason that people are giving Cyberpunk 2077 a try. The game has also improved in the 21 months since it first launched thanks to multiple updates, most recently the 1.6 “Edgerunners” update, which have fixed a plethora of bugs and performance issues, and added new options including a long-awaited transmog system. It’s still a little too soon for me to jump in—an overhaul of Cyberpunk 2077’s woefully-borked police is still in the works, for instance, and more bug fixes and content including a full-on expansion are bound to keep coming—but overall, Cyberpunk 2077 would now seem to be in the shape it should have been two years ago. For Edgerunners viewers unaware of the game’s ugly history, or anyone who’s just tired of waiting, that’s not a bad place to start.
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