'Cyberpunk 2077' Player Count Has Dropped By Nearly 80%, But That's Okay
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Featured Image Credit: CD Projekt Red
Cyberpunk 2077, the dystopian RPG that broke the record for the most concurrent players in a single-player title on Steam, is now struggling to secure even a fifth of its original player base.
In fact, Cyberpunk 2077 was ruling the roost on Steam before it even released, outselling titles like Phasmophobia, Among Us, and Football Manager 2021. Moreover, CD Projekt Red saw more than eight million pre-orders for the game, raking in approximately $500 million for the company, ergo rivalling the success of heavy-hitters like Grand Theft Auto V out of the gate. As a result, it recouped eight years of development costs in one day. "The estimated licensing royalties receivable by the Company in association with pre-order sales of Cyberpunk 2077 across all of its digital distribution channels have exceeded the sum of the following: total development expenditures related to the game, and the game's marketing and promotional costs borne by the Company - either already incurred or anticipated for the remainder of 2020," read the announcement from the Polish company.
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Therefore, it's disheartening to discover that the concurrent player count for Cyberpunk 2077 on Steam is spiralling downwards. It was only last month that the game saw one million players gallivanting with Johnny Silverhand in Night City, whereas today, it's reaching about 225,000 players on a good day. The report from Githyp mentions that the decrease is triple the rate that players disappeared from The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, which on a superficial level, is damning news. Though the console versions of the game suffered from a range of bugs and glitches, from silly saucy ones to the much more frustrating corruption of save files, the PC version seemed to launch unscathed. The situation was so bad that Xbox One and PlayStation 4 players were able to refund their digital copies (however, that didn't overly impact CD Projekt Red's bottom line).
With that in mind, we'll explore the reasons why this exodus has been so significant and so sudden. Firstly, it's important to remember that this is par for the course for a lot of single-player titles, regardless of how well they are reviewed. Multiplayer games and live games will retain a constant community for longer, purely because they are updated and released regularly and thrive off player activity. And, to compare it with The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt once again, CD Projekt Red confirmed that this game would be much more condensed than the gritty fantasy. Though there is more to explore, these missions and side-missions are shorter, and some players simply aren't interested in 100%-ing every game they dive into. Believe it.
We're waiting on free DLC for Cyberpunk 2077 which will arrive in "early 2021", too, which may draw players back into the game, and the developer reiterated that the multiplayer mode has been shelved while Cyberpunk 2077 receives remedial patches. CD Projekt Red has shrugged off insinuations that their newest game will struggle without its multiplayer mode from launch, citing The Witcher's stalwart success five years on from its release. Numbers do not lie, sir.
And, according to an anonymous employee, the upcoming DLCs will be delving into the "crazy and cool ideas Mike [Pondsmith, creator of the tabletop game] gave us when we began briefing the project." So, it's not a death knell for Cyberpunk 2077, and more like a brief recess while the team has their nose to the grindstone making it the best game it could be. Chill.
Topics: News, Cyberpunk 2077
