Cyberpunk 2077 Has Over 1 Million Players On Steam

If there was any doubt about how much hype there was around CD Projekt Red’s sci-fi RPG, the amount of Cyberpunk 2077 Steam players has put that well and truly to rest.

Even with the concerns around bugs and the game’s performance, that hasn’t stopped people from absolutely lapping up Night City. The game was expected to be the biggest hit of 2020, and it looks like it’s well and truly on the way from its PC numbers alone.

At the time of writing, Cyberpunk 2077 is sitting just north of 974,000 concurrent players on Steam. It surpassed 1 million, putting it just shy of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive‘s peak player count for the day, and streets ahead of every other game on Valve’s digital platform.

Steam’s figures also don’t include the many players playing through GOG Galaxy, the Steam-equivalent rival platform that’s also owned by CD Projekt Red. (A large part of the game’s marketing highlighted that buying through GOG meant 100 percent of the profits would go to the developer, and it’s likely that some fans of The Witcher games would be playing there precisely for that reason.) Figures could also climb in the coming days, as more people load up game for the first time over the weekend.

So despite all of the hype and slight deflation, PC players are absolutely lapping it up. I’ll be especially keen to see the next hardware survey from Valve to see if there’s been any meaningful change in the average gaming PC. Cyberpunk 2077 has been a huge marketing drawcard for Nvidia GPUs especially, but it’s also been helping encourage more PC sales throughout all of 2020.

People have wanted this game for years, and we’re finally starting to see just how big that demand really is. Analysts are tipping the game to sell 30 million copies by this time next year. And if the lifecycle of The Witcher 3 (or games like No Man’s Sky) is any guide, sales should get better and better in subsequent years — provided CD Projekt Red moves quickly to rectify the bugs causing the most friction.

“First year sales are likely to be driven by both critic and user reviews, and the latter may depend on how quickly and comprehensively CD Projekt fixes the bugs,” Omar Sheikh, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, told Bloomberg.