Cyberpunk 2077 With Record-breaking Results on Steam
Not even half a day has passed and Cyberpunk 2077 has turned into a white hot item on Steam, becoming the most popular single player game in the history of the platform. The title also has a chance to beat GTA V as a video game with the best launch sales ever, thanks to i.a. pre-orders.
- Pre-orders of Cyberpunk 2077 exceeded 8 million copies;
- With an activity record of more than one million Steam users, Cyberpunk 2077 is the most popular single player title in platform's history.
The wait for the debut of Cyberpunk 2077 has come to an end, and in the light of the reviews so far, it is fair to say that the game has still lived up to expectations, although it does not lack bugs. Apparently, the issues mentioned in the first reviews did not scare the players away. Even if that were the case, according to CD Projekt (via Twitter) Cyberpunk 2077's pre-order sales alone amounted to over 8 million copies on all platforms. It's impossible to confirm whether the PC edition will be as good as WoW: Shadowlands, but it's clearly on track to beat the record 11 million copies sold by Grand Theft Auto V sold on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on the day of its release (via Guinness Book of Records).
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Cyberpunk 2077 conqueres Steam (again)
However, it is doubtful that the sales of Cyberpunk 2077 will stop at 8 million copies. As soon as it was possible to download the game on Steam, users reached a peak amount of 23.5 terabytes of data downloaded per second (via Daniel Ahmad), which is a single player game record and probably the second largest ever load to be born by Steam caused by a game, after the release of the full version of PUBG. We do not know the statistics from GOG.com, but there is no reason to doubt the popularity of Cyberpunk 2077 in CD Projekt's own store. Especially since both GOG.com and Steam were at some point unable to handle the load and went down for a short time. This was mentioned by Fabian Mario Döhla from CD Projekt RED on Twitter, among other places.
It shouldn't come as a surprise, then, that right after its debut, Cyberpunk 2077 became one of the most popular games on Steam. At the hottest moment, over a million users played the game, and at the time of writing this text, there are still almost 900 thousand users. Only Counter-Strike: Global Offensive outperformed the former score today, and lags behind CD Projekt RED's new work at this moment.
Of course, it's still not an army like the one that stormed Playerunknown's Battlegrounds servers in January 2018. However, both PUBG Corp. and Valve's shooter are online games, and these usually do much better than strictly single player games like Cyberpunk 2077. Just look at the result of other single player titles for comparison. Fallout 4 barely came close to half a million users, just like Life is Strange 2 (via Steam Charts).
What's more, when Valve and PUBG Corp's shooters were beating Steam records, both were available pretty much exclusively on this platform (CS:GO launched on 7th generation consoles, but these versions stopped being supported long before the last record established by the game 8 months ago). Meanwhile, not only did Cyberpunk 2077 hit the consoles, but it is also available on competitive digital distribution platforms: GOG.com and Epic Games Store. So it cannot be ruled out that after summing up all the buyers of the PC edition, PUBG's record could be broken.
The huge popularity of Cyberpunk 2077 on launch is not surprising after such a huge marketing campaign. The question remains whether the devs will be able to maintain player interest in the game. The release of PS5 and XSX/S editins as well as the online mode may help, but the elimination of at least most of the bugs that currently plague the game should be considered top priority.
