Cyberpunk 2077 blows away Steam record as tons of gamers rush to play at launch

Cyberpunk 2077 has blown away the previous record for simultaneous players in a single player game on Steam (and for concurrent viewers on Twitch, too).

As PC Gamer points out, that previous record was Fallout 4 with 472,962 concurrent players, which Cyberpunk 2077 easily exceeded after its launch, going on to break the million mark.

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Peak players reached 1,003,264 to be precise, although that’s not quite up there with the big multiplayer games of course – Dota 2 for example has recorded 1,295,114 concurrent gamers before, and the record is held by PUBG with a staggering 3,257,248 people enjoying the battle royale at the same time.

Obviously that’s just on Steam, and of course Cyberpunk 2077 is available on other PC platforms, namely GOG.com and Epic – so PC player numbers will be even higher than the figures mentioned. Indeed, folks who steered away from Steam might well be somewhat glad, at least on launch day, because the initial massive rush of gamers downloading the crucial ‘day one patch’ anecdotally caused a lot of slowdowns (or even crashes).

Some people were also complaining about stalling at the end of the game’s download on Steam, but Valve stepped in to provide clarification on this – and what’s actually happening here is that encrypted data is being unpacked, which takes some time.

You can verify this is what's happening by looking for "Disk Activity" on the downloads page in the Steam client.When the unpacking has caught up, you'll resume downloading the remaining few GBs. No need to switch data centers or restart the Steam client! pic.twitter.com/E9SmnAtfm0December 10, 2020

Twitch milestone

As well as the masses of players rushing to Cyberpunk 2077 on Steam, there were also a million people watching on Twitch, a further eye-opening statistic – again, it’s the first single player title to achieve this feat (and only a handful of other multiplayer games have ever exceeded a million concurrent viewers).

So, it has been an impressive launch for Cyberpunk 2077 on the face of it, although given how keenly awaited the open world RPG has been, and the hype machine behind it, all of this isn’t exactly surprising.

However, the undercurrent to this is seen in the Steam reviews already up, where there are a number of complaints about early bugs and glitches – although it’s not clear if those reports are from gamers who have updated to the latest freshly released Nvidia drivers. Doing that is a must for those with Nvidia GPUs, by all accounts, but at any rate, we’re expecting a flurry of further Cyberpunk 2077 patches to be on the way in these early days of the game…