Without any doubts, Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the most anticipated games of 2020, so it is not surprising that as soon as it became available it set a new record for a single player title for the number of concurrent players with Steam confirming that over 1 million players jacked in to Night City on release. This number of Cyberpunk 2077 players even challenges multiplayer Counter Strike: Global Offensive as far as that metric is concerned.
The number of simultaneous Cyberpunk 2077 players on Steam peaked at 1,003,264 on release. Among single player titles, Bethesda's Fallout 4 previously held Steam's record for most concurrently played games on Steam with 472,962, so CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077 performed twice as good. It also did noticeably better when compared to CDPR's Witcher 3: Wild Hunt title.
For multiplayer titles, a million of simultaneous players is not something unseen. The all-time record for the most players in a title on Steam was set by PUBG with 3,257,248 gamers playing it on January 13, 2018. The record for Counter Strike: Global Offensive was 1,308,963 concurrent players, whereas Dota 2 peaked at 1,295,114 players.
The Cyberpunk 2077 is available on multiple hardware platforms and on several distribution platforms, including Epic Games Store, GOG.com, Steam, and Stadia. Therefore, the number of concurrent players is considerably higher than one million across different platforms. In fact, it could well surpass CS:GO and Dota 2 for the most simultaneous players in a game.
The popularity of Cyberpunk 2077 is certainly impressive and shows that a singleplayer title can challenge multiplayer games. But Cyberpunk's success could also be good news for makers of gaming hardware. As our Cyberpunk 2077 PC Benchmarks, Settings, and Performance Analysis demonstrated, the title greatly benefits from high-end hardware and even the GeForce RTX 3090 cannot hit 60 frames per second at a 4K resolution with Ultra quality settings.
It remains to be seen how exactly the release of Cyberpunk 2077 affects sales of high-end PC hardware as well as the latest game consoles in the coming months and whether shortages of components will persist well into 2021 as a result. In the meantime, it will be interesting to see how many gamers will call in sick on Thursday and Friday?
