Steam Breaks Concurrent Player Record With Help From Cyberpunk 2077

It has only been a few days since Cyberpunk 2077 released, and Steam has already broken a record for the most concurrent users ever. As of December 13, the new record is more than 24 million players, with CD Projekt Red's RPG playing an enormous role in making this possible. And it did it all despite another PC platform also accounting for many Cyberpunk sales.

To be precise, 24,776,635 people were on Steam concurrently on December 12, with about a quarter of those users active in a game. This was actually broken since the story was first published. More than 24.8 million people were online the morning of December 13. It has only dipped by about 1.5 million people since then.

Since the pandemic began, Steam's concurrent numbers have steadily increased, albeit with a brief dip in the summer--hopefully those absent players were still practicing social distancing.

So, what are the driving forces behind the recent surge? Cyberpunk 2077 is a major player, of course, with an all-time peak of more than 1 million players, while Steam staple Counter-Strike: Global Offensive slightly edged it out on the same day. Most of the other games on the chart are Steam mainstays, including Dota 2, Player's Unknown Battlegrounds, Grand Theft Auto V, and Team Fortress 2.

But what's most impressive is that Cyberpunk 2077's overall PC player numbers are likely much higher. CD Projekt Red offers the game on Steam, but its own digital game store GOG is also very popular. The game is already listed on GOG's best-sellers page. It's also for sale through the Epic Games Stores, and PC owners can also opt to play it through Google Stadia.

PC players have had an easier time getting Cyberpunk 2077 to run in a playable state--assuming their PC was up to the challenge--than some console players. The game isn't running well on base PS4 or Xbox One systems, and we've heard of numerous crashing issues across several platforms. The Xbox Series X, which runs the Xbox One version in backwards compatibility mode, fares a little better, as does Google Stadia. CD Projekt Red has now admitted the last-gen console versions are not in a great place, even offering refunds for Cyberpunk 2077 purchases. Updates are on the way for all platforms, including PC, where stable performance can be difficult to achieve.