The GitHyp website, which collects game statistics, noticed that Cyberpunk 2077 lost 79% of Steam players a month after its release. The CD Projekt game still shows excellent online, but its previous hit The Witcher 3 at one time managed to keep users many times longer.On the release day, December 10, the peak online Cyberpunk 2077 on Steam exceeded 1 million people.
This became an absolute record for a single project. However, now the interest of users in the game has noticeably dropped.
Despite the large sales and mostly positive reviews on Steam (based on more than 300 thousand reviews), the number of simultaneous players dropped to 225 thousand in a month.
It is worth noting that single projects always lose users after release (sometimes there is a decline of more than 79%) — at least because people go through the plot and no longer launch the game regularly. However, the case of Cyberpunk 2077 is interesting precisely in comparison with the previous CD Projekt hit.
As noted by GitHyp, The Witcher 3 was released online by only 92 thousand people. At the same time, a month later, 55 thousand users were still playing it at the same time, and a 79% decline comparable to Cyberpunk 2077 occurred only three months after its release.
Also at the beginning of last year, The Witcher 3 set its own online record when, after the winter sale and on the wave of interest in Cyberpunk 2077, the number of simultaneous players reached 103 thousand. At the same time, a month later, the project lost only 40% of this number, which may indicate a high user retention.
There were a lot of scandals around Cyberpunk 2077 at the release, largely due to the large number of bugs and the technical condition of the game on consoles of the last generation. Despite this, the game only last week lost the lead in the weekly Steam chart.
This year CD Projekt will also face several court proceedings at once, including a class action organized by one of the investors. In addition, the Polish Competition and Consumer Protection Authority (UOKiK) will begin checking the company for the scale of Cyberpunk 2077 problems and will monitor how developers will fulfill promises to fix them.
Nevertheless, the online project has every chance to grow more than once, as soon as CD Projekt fixes most of the bugs. Also, future discounts, the release of large DLC and the multiplayer mode announced before the release will certainly contribute to the growth of interest. However, the latter will obviously not be released soon.