‘Cyberpunk 2077’ Is Doing 70,000 Steam Players A Night, Four Years Later

Because it's a fantastic game.
It should never have come out for last gen consoles. That is a fact.
- That was 100% it's downfall. I don't know what executive said "But it Haaaass to run on them" - I guarantee every engineer there knew it would be a disaster on the older gen. I know they said at the beginning that it would, but they should have just sucked it up and said "Look, folks, we're sorry, it just can't run and you won't have a good time, so it's next gen only. We'll see you in Night City when you can"
  
  I bet many of the engineers did and then their management told them that they have to do it anyway.
  
  It would have saved an absolute mountain of bad press. And upset customers.
  
  It was quite literally the reason why it hit 70k players, NVIDIA. cdpr, allegedly, got wads of money to become the tech demo for the green team, which made the red engine require an overhaul that killed its performance on old gen consoles. Nowadays it's used as a benchmark. If you look at the player chart it peaked during CES and cratered back down to almost half of the 70k Tassi (aka mouthpiece) is touting. What really is a team worth exploring is how CDPR knowingly deceived millions of people, and thanks to the short memory of the Internet and (likely paid) puff pieces like this, has regenerated its image (and stock price) to a point that quite literally they got away with what they did and saw no consequences. It's appalling that companies no longer pay when they cheat customers.
  This is also a strong message on media literacy. There's two main types of bait, rage and circlejerk, Tassi enacted the second with this puff piece. A real journalist, would have looked at the average player count of the last few months and used that, but no, "journalist" Paul Tassi chose to make a point from a blip caused by an event that EVERYONE could be aware of and, "journalist" Paul Tassi, should be aware of. This is so disingenuous that it becomes a master class on how media influences people with distorting information.
  Edit: As another point, "journalist" Paul Tassi purposefully omits the genial Stardew Valley which usually clocks in close to double the playerbase of Cyberpunk (among over 10 single player games that overtake or compare, like FM, Don't Starve, Terraria, RDR2, HoIIV, et al).
- I think trying to make the game run on the measly 8 gigs of ram, 1.8ghz cpu, and a GPU that's worse than a Radeon 7790 would just make an awful experience. The minimum specs for 1080p all low settings is a CPU and GPU that are over twice as fast.
  
  Have to disagree on the GPU part -- I first played it with a 970, mostly on medium. It can be nearly maxxed out (no RT) on a 6600XT, which I used for my second playthrough (on Linux).
- Ironically, I get more issues with the game now, on patch 2.2, than I ever got when the game first came out and hadn't been patched yet.
  
  I feel like patch 2.2 specifically added in some performance issues and bugs. I played a lot on 2.12 and I remember it running a lot smoother/more consistent, but I haven't gotten around to actually double checking it (I apparently have four versions installed like a crazy person).

It’s a freaking good game.
I never played it at release, but modded to the brim just before phantom liberty came out (yes, I know, bad timing), and I was blown away.
- I picked up cyberpunk last summer (finally) and while it’s visually stunning and fairly immersive, I had some game breaking bugs where I had to reload several hours beforehand and redo certain missions until they triggered properly. Not once, but several times. And I didn’t even mod anything.
  I think my favorite was fast traveling with Claire, ending up in the sky and falling out of the truck. Reloaded, did the mission again only to splatter myself and die because I got shot out of the truck. Third time she wouldn’t stop driving around the block. I let it go for a good half hour just to see if it would end but it never did. Eventually the AI just kept driving into the wall of a building. Reloaded….again.
  There were a lot of others but that took me all afternoon just to finish that one race. I had probably a dozen similar issues throughout my playthrough and it really tanked my enthusiasm for the game. I’ll finish it eventually.
  
  I played it for few days, got pretty far, but stopped playing because it's just so repetitive.
  
  Yesterday I finished the badlands race and when she dropped me off, she hit me with the car...

I can’t believe that game‘s been out for four years now.
- Honestly, I thought it longer.

I think players are beginning to appreciate the work put into the game and understand the true depth of the world, characters, and missions.
It's a fundamentally great game with a catastrophic launch that now is just a memory.
- A launch that taught companies they can in fact release unfinished games and still outsell everything they have previously done
  
  That is... not the lesson CDProjektRed learnt

It's 4 years after release, but they only recently finished it.
- At least they stuck to it, and were transparent about the state of things.
  I've bought several early access games that I don't play yet, because I believe they will get there at some point. My hardware doesn't do cyberpunk 2077 justice, but if it did I would've bought it too.
  
  They didn't release it as early access. It was the full release. Then they finished it last year. That's the issue.

It helps that there's a pretty robust modding community. It gives the game good replayability, in addition to all the improvements and changes CDPR have made. Sure, a huge percentage of the mods are sexy outfits, but that's pretty normal for a heavily modded game.

The gold standard in games retaining playerbases in this genre is Baldur’s Gate 3, which still puts up over 100,000 players nightly, though it released just over a year and a half ago.
"Released"...
Going off memory but I think BG3's act 1 was out before cyberpunk or close to the same time. I had 100+ hours before the game released, and it was with huge gaps of play time. I think it was in Beta for at least two years.
- Well… Cyberpunk was basically an unfinished alpha when it was released.
  Also, BG3 has no major DLC.
  
  it was (mostly) fine for PC. it was only absolutely abysmal if you were a console player.
  For PC, although there were bugs, it wasn't as buggy when comparing it to like a bethesda title. It just got a lot of vitrol because its of the very rare moments in time where the console version of a title was unplayable(as when something is usually unplayable, its usually the oppisite)
  
  Cyberpunk was basically an unfinished alpha when it was released.
  I played it the day it was released on pc, the only issue was how shitty the cars drove. But you could change the setting so bikes were usable
  Consoles were different, but PC I never really had issues.
- Fluff piece has the typical fluff piece inconsistencies. Chief among them, utter lack of disclosure.
- I bought both cyberpunk and BG3 in gog instead of steam. I would guess cyberpunk sells more through gog than BG3 would since it's their own platform. Would be interesting if gog stats could be seen as well, but since it's DRM free, tracking stats on some people are outright impossible.

I mean I upgraded my PC just to be able to play it when it came out and now I want to upgrade again for Path- and Raytracing.
- Wait for DLSS4, the mfgen is series 5 exclusive but the transformer model with the improved performance is being ported all the way back to the 2000 series. Might get the performance uplift you need without buying anything if you already have an RTX card.
  
  And if nvidia doesn't do it, modders likely will. Been running framegen on my 2060 since long before patch 2.13, and the mod version is better than the official one in my opinion.
- I just upgraded to a 4070 Ti, and I gotta say that coming from my old 2080 Ti, it’s not that much better looking.
  
  I'm still using my old 1060 and it runs like a charm on medium! And it looks great as well. Can't believe how well they've managed to optimize this game.
  
  Yeah, probably but my PC is also for me what for other people is their car or instrument. I just want to keep upgrading and fiddling with it.

Oh yeah? well I'm doing seventy thousand and ONE steam players a night. Take that, CyberFlunk.

Yeah it kicks ass. This is like making a story out of Skyrim or Baldur's Gate 3 or even Witcher 3 continuing to have players. People like playing really good single player RPGs. There aren't that many of them.

I'm quite glad. Its become a solid game that manages to not feel like a hollow collectathon despite ubisofts best efforts to make people like it. The music is banger, the visuals are haunting, gameplay can get tailored to your own perticular liking of batshit crazy thanks to build and perk system that is the best by far since payday 2 and it is the one game where I walk as much as possible. If only metro system was better and didn't take away control from player and rebinding controls wasn't hitmans experience turned up to 11.

Good, they deserve it.
They released among death threats and stick by their game this entire time.
I would buy it again if I could, so I just gift it to friends who get Steam Decks.

Its been my favorite of the last few years.

I'm guessing it got a boost from the Witcher 4 announcement.