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 12, the new record is more than 24 million players, with CD Projekt Red's RPG playing an enormous role in making this possible.

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. 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.

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.