Cyberpunk 2077 has lost 79% of its Steam players since launch

In brief: Are you still playing Cyberpunk 2077 on Steam? If the answer is no, then you’re one of the 79 percent of players who have abandoned the game since it launched almost one month ago. The decline is three times faster than CD Projekt Red’s previous title, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

After years of hype and three delays, it didn’t come as too much of a surprise to see Cyberpunk 2077 draw in over one million concurrent Steam players on launch day, beating Fallout 4’s previous record for a single-player experience.

But the RPG hasn’t been able to maintain those impressive figures. GitHyp reports that player counts have been dropping quickly, reaching a low of 225,000 over the weekend.

The site also notes that most single-player games do lose around the same number of players in the month after their launch, but open-world titles are the exception. The Witcher 3, for example, held on to half its playerbase four weeks after it arrived in 2015, taking three months to lose 79 percent of players.

At the end of 2019, the Netflix series prompted a resurgence in The Witcher 3’s popularity, bringing in more players than at launch. Over a year later, and it still hasn’t lost 79 percent of its new players.

There are caveats to remember: the decline only counts Steam players, not those on the Epic Games Store, GOG, or Stadia.

Something that could give Cyberpunk 2077’s Steam player numbers a boost is the upcoming free DLC. It’s supposed to be landing in “early 2021,” but given the game’s other issues CD Projekt Red has to deal with, that might be an optimistic time frame.