Cyberpunk Edgerunners from Studio Trigger has pushed the player count of Cyberpunk 2077, which was released in a terrible state in late 2020 but has since been updated to 1.6, pretty hard.

Cyberpunk 2077 was a sobering slap in the face for CD Projekt RED after repeated delays and the poor quality of the first-person adventure (it ran at almost unplayable frame rates on the base PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, not to mention the glitches). Nearly two years have passed since then, and the Polish studio has been working on improvements to the game, which has also been released for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series.

But now, thanks to the Cyberpunk Edgerunners anime on Netflix, Cyberpunk 2077 is back in the gamers’ favour: according to SteamDB, the game has had over 85,000 concurrent players (a discount played a role in it, though). The Polish studio’s game hasn’t seen numbers like this since January 2021, with a ceiling of between 10,000 and 15,000 players, so it is a substantial increase for a game that claims the highest all-time concurrent player count for a singleplayer game on Steam (1054388).

When Arcane was released in December, League of Legends saw a 50% jump in players, and DotA 2 saw a boost in players when Dragon’s Blood’s first and second seasons launched. It shows how a strategically timed sale helped, and Cyberpunk 2077 recently received its 1.6, the Edgerunner update, which will be the last significant update for the PlayStation 4/Xbox One duo, as it’s official that the Phantom Liberty expansion, the only one of its kind in the game, will be skipping the 2013 console line, so you’ll need a pretty hefty PC, a PlayStation 5 that’s 50 euros more expensive, or an Xbox Series that’s not going to be priced higher unless you’re a masochist, in which case you’ll need Google Stadia as a last resort to play…

What is the lesson? On the one hand, Netflix does impact games when it comes to adaptations; on the other hand, quality improvements also play a role in their success.

Source: PCGamer