Cyberpunk 2077's Player Base Has Declined 3x Faster Than The Witcher 3’s Launch on Steam

Since the divisive launch of Cyberpunk 2077 last month, CD Projekt Red’s new futuristic RPG was pulled from the PlayStation Store with both Microsoft and Sony offering full refunds – something we’ve never seen happen to a triple-A game.

However, without the same performance issues that ruined its launch on consoles, Cyberpunk 2077 has done much better on PC, debuting at #1 on Steam with over 1 million players and maintaining Mostly Positive feedback from over 300k player reviews.

Unfortunately, Cyberpunk 2077 hasn’t been able to maintain its player base on Steam. And when comparing the new IP to CDPR’s previous biggest game, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, the dev/publisher could be in even more trouble.

When Cyberpunk 2077 launched a little over 3 weeks ago, it became the first singleplayer game ever to break 1 million concurrent players on Steam. But over this past weekend, Cyberpunk continued its decline, struggling to peak at 225k players.

While that 79% drop in players is worrying, most singleplayer games typically lose around the same amount of players, if not even more, after their first month on Steam. Open-world games like Cyberpunk are usually the exception, and compared to The Witcher 3, CDPR’s new digital playground certainly isn’t doing as well at keeping players interested in coming back for more.

Although CDPR’s previous hit only peaked with 92k players during its launch back in May 2015, The Witcher 3 was still able to retain over half its player base with a peak of 55k players online a month later. It took 3 whole months before Witcher 3 lost more than 79% of its players on Steam.

At the start of 2020, hype for Cyberpunk and a sale helped Witcher 3 break its own all-time peak record with 103k concurrent players on Steam. One month later, it again only lost 40% of its players. One year later, and it still hasn’t lost more than 74% of its player base since peaking in January.

Even more recently, The Witcher 3‘s player base has started to increase again due to another sale and players likely returning to say, “¡Hola!” to Geralt of Rivia after their buggy trip to Night City.

CDPR has a proven track record of fixing their games on PC post-launch, and one of the biggest reasons Cyberpunk 2077 still maintains a positive average score on Steam is because in many ways the retail version of the game already looks better than the game’s reveal back in 2018.

Cyberpunk 2077‘s player counts are sure to spike again as more bugs are fixed and when the game goes on sale — we’ve already seen it happen numerous times in the past with Witcher games. But with the developer now having to focus on trying to fix the last-gen console versions, we’re probably going to have to wait even longer for new content and multiplayer to help revive the player base.