Cyberpunk 2077 breaks Steam record despite technical issues

For a brief window after launching on Steam, Cyberpunk 2077 brought the popular PC platform to its knees. “The hype is real,” a CD Projekt Red developer wrote on Twitter about the temporary outage. Accordingly, that excitement shot Cyberpunk 2077 to the top of Steam charts, with the open-world game immediately breaking the record for most concurrent users in a single-player game — you know, once Valve’s platform started working.

Prior to this, that honor was held by Fallout 4, another open-world RPG that saw over 470,000 fans try it at the same time. Cyberpunk 2077 absolutely flew over that record, with Steam reporting that the day one concurrents clocked in at 1,003,264 fans. That’s well over double the last record — and it’s particularly impressive when you consider PC players are being split among platforms, as the game is also being sold on CD Projekt Red’s own GOG storefront. To contextualize the enormity of this, Cyberpunk is currently beating out the number of concurrent players on extremely popular multiplayer games, like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2.

What makes all of this particularly notable is that Cyberpunk 2077 has attained this record despite a myriad of reported technical issues. While these problems seem to be the most pervasive on last generation consoles, PC players aren’t immune. The top review at the moment reminds everyone to download drivers to make sure the game runs OK. From there, top reviews that aren’t memes largely note some issue or other in their write-ups.

“1060 recommended my ass,” one player wrote. “As in: performance ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sucks.”

“The game runs extremely poorly,” another top review reads. “I am aware that my hardware is far from the latest - i7 7700k with a GTX 1080 - but the game struggles to break even at 50 frames, with frequent dips into the 20-30 fps range, alongside microstuttering.”

The game, it should be noted, currently has a “mostly positive” rating on Steam. Some players, after all, are running the game fine — especially anyone with a top of the line rig. But if you peek at Cyberpunk 2077’s forums on Steam, most of the topics are about performance issues of some sort.

Image: Steam via Polygon

CD Projekt Red has not commented on the widespread technical issues plaguing the game on day one.