Cyberpunk 2077 may have set numerous commercial records when it launched last month. However, it seems like CD Projekt Red's victories are short-lived. Steam's player base for Cyberpunk 2077 has drastically dropped mere weeks after launch.
Cyberpunk 2077 Steam player base dropped by 79% since launch
Data aggregator GitHyp reports that Cyberpunk 2077 has been losing players consistently over the past few weeks. Peaking at over 1 million concurrent players towards the end of its first week, CD Projekt Red's game lost 25% of its player base the very next week. The game ended up with just half of the number of players in the middle of December. By the end of the year, Cyberpunk 2077 was struggling to keep its numbers above 250,000 players.
Now, at the turn of the year, this threshold has been breached. Cyberpunk 2077's player base at the end of the first week of January has dropped below 250,000. The trend continues to decline, with the game registering just a little about 100,000 concurrent players in the past few days. While a hundred thousand players is still a large number of people playing, especially for a single-player game, these numbers aren't exactly the amount you'd attribute to what once has been seen as the most anticipated game of 2020. Nevertheless, Cyberpunk 2077 still is the 4th most played game on Steam right now, accounting for almost 10% of Steam's users.
Steam Winter Sale could have eaten up the game's playerbase
Aside from the game's poor optimization, other factors that may have contributed to Cyberpunk 2077's decline is the Steam Holiday Sale that followed the game's release. Players may have picked up other games and have quickly moved on from the game. Besides, Cyberpunk's main storyline can be finished in merely 20 hours, so it's no surprise that many players have stopped playing it by now.
Cyberpunk 2077 was also not on sale during the Steam Winter Sale. This could have prevented new players from trying it out, most especially since the game was the subject of much scrutiny over the past few weeks. Without a steep discount, a lot of people aren't willing to even touch the game.
Given that most of the game's player base is playing on Steam, it doesn't bode well for CD Projekt Red as a whole. Their disastrous launch on consoles likely turned off a majority of players, with a large number of them asking for refunds within weeks of the game's launch. Still, the game was able to sell 13 million copies, making it one of the best-performing titles of 2020. At the end of the day, it's the bottom line is all that matters, right?
Do you still play Cyberpunk 2077? Check out these mods to make the gameplay experience better.
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