After Phantom Liberty Launch, Cyberpunk 2077's Steam Player Count Leaves Starfield In The Dust

Cyberpunk 2077's new 2.0 Phantom Liberty update has been extremely well-received by players, who are returning to Night City in droves. The game's concurrent player count on Steam has reached numbers the game hasn't seen since its 2020 launch, but even more surprisingly, those numbers have surpassed that of Bethesda's massive new spacefaring RPG, Starfield.

According to Steam, there are currently 230,735 players exploring Night City, putting it in third place behind Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (991,070 players) and Dota 2 (604,998). Meanwhile, Bethesda's first new IP in a quarter of a century is lurking in ninth place with 95,690 players exploring the cosmos in Starfield--a number that places it below PUBG: Battlegrounds, Apex Legends, Baldur's Gate 3, Source SDK Base 2007 (used for playing Source Engine mods), and GTA 5. It's worth noting Steam is only one platform for the games on PC, and Starfield's Game Pass players aren't included in its Steam concurrents.

Cyberpunk 2077 had a notoriously rocky launch back in 2020 (though the studio's execs seem to disagree with that assessment), but it appears that the development team at CD Projekt Red was truly committed to bringing players the experience they'd been been promised via the game's marketing. The new update is so expansive--and adds so many new features to the game--that the game's developers have suggested that players may be better off starting a new game entirely from scratch so they can get the full experience.

Players and critics alike seem to agree that the expansion turns Cyberpunk 2077 into the game it was meant to be, with review scores for the Phantom Liberty DLC surpassing the scores received by the base game when it launched in 2020. Although it did take three years for Cyberpunk 2077 to reach its full potential, the current player count on Steam seems to suggest players seem to think it was well worth the wait.