Cyberpunk 2077 has seen a major rise in its player count lately, with numbers soaring to just under what they were at the game’s launch.
According to Steam Charts, Cyberpunk 2077 hit roughly 85,555 concurrent players on Steam over this past weekend on Sunday, September 18 2022. For comparison, the game was sitting at around 22,200 concurrent players less than a week prior on Tuesday.
After a bug-filled launch and some game-breaking issues, the popularity of Cyberpunk took a massive hit. As a result, CD Projekt Red’s much-anticipated game lost players quickly after release. Cyberpunk 2077 launched in December 2020, with around one million players hopping in right away. Only a month later in January 2021, however, there were approximately 80,000 concurrent players.
This recent spike in the player count hasn’t gone unnoticed by those who work on the game. Cyberpunk 2077 quest director Pawel Sasko thanked fans online for giving the game a “second chance.”
Thank you so much chooms for this second chance 😭 https://t.co/IONdDq8D9x
— Paweł Sasko (@PaweSasko) September 18, 2022
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Part of why gamers seem to be coming back to the game is thanks to the brand new anime series Cyberpunk Edgerunners. The show first landed on the streaming platform on September 13 and has gotten massive praise since releasing. It currently has a 100% critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with user rating also sitting high at 97%.
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is a standalone 10-episode anime series that takes place in the world of Cyberpunk 2077. The story revolves around a street kid trying to make it in Night City. As a way to survive, the protagonist chooses to become an Edgerunner.
And with the game’s first major DLC – Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty – set to arrive sometime next year, the momentum that Edgerunners is bringing back to the game could be expanded even further when this new expansion drops.
The success of Netflix’s new Cyberpunk anime is further proof of Netflix’s interest and impact on the gaming scene. Netflix’s The Witcher show another example of how their content has been bringing players back to the video game adaptations.