Things are getting worse for Cyberpunk 2077, it seems. After a disastrous release, which generated considerable reaction to the state of the final game, it appears that PC players are abandoning the game in large scale.
After the record debut that saw 1 million players venture into Night City at the same time, the game lost more than 75% of its player base on Steam. That huge drop came less than a month after the big game was released on November 10.
Steam Statistics show that the game peaked with 1,054,388 simultaneous players on December 12, just two days after launch. The game has been in constant decline since then, and has peaked at just 147,788 simultaneous players in the past 24 hours.
The peak in the past seven days is slightly higher, at 225.55 on January 2. As it is a Saturday, we can expect more people to have time to play, although it is not looking good for Cyberpunk 2077. We can only assume that these numbers will continue to drop until CD Projekt Red releases a significant update.
Interestingly, Cyberpunk 2077 still has a positive review score of 78.27%, with 276,476 positive reviews compared to just 76,742 negative reviews. This suggests that this drop in the number of players is not just due to the myriad of problems in the game.
Games will always see a drop in player numbers after launch, although the longer it takes people to move on to something else, the better. CDPR’s last open-world game, The Witcher 3, took three months to lose as many players as Cyberpunk 2077 did in a third of the time.
The current score from the game’s analysis suggests that most Steam players don’t like the game, even if they’re no longer playing. One of the criticisms made of Cyberpunk was how short the main mission was, along with the lack of side missions, so it could easily be that runaway players ran out of things to do.
Or they are just waiting for CDPR to start rolling out major fixes and content updates, when they will then return to Night City. Because the new content is always a draw, as is the ability to play a game without the bugs and flaws that have plagued players so far.
A Cyberpunk 2077 patch for PS5 and Xbox Series X is expected to be released in the coming months. Not only does it promise to improve the look of the game on the new consoles, but you can also see a new wave of players experiencing the game.
However, CDPR will need Cyberpunk 2077 to be fairly bug-free by then if it is to repair its somewhat damaged reputation that has been dragged by the game’s irregular release and other controversies surrounding its development.