Steam sets new record for concurrent players thanks to Black Friday and Cyberpunk 2077

Steam sets newborn record for concurrent players thanks to Black Friday and Cyberpunk 2077

(Image credit: YouTube / CD Projekt Red)

Steam has broken its record for the near co-occurrent players, with numbers of PC gamers logged into the platform hitting 27,384,959, easily thrashing the previous all-time peak of 26.9 million (set in April 2021).

The radical record was reached yesterday going by figures from SteamDB, and of those folk, 7.8 million were really in-game at the time – which is a bit bit shy of the previous record which is 8.1 million in-game punt in Border 2020.

Component part of the ground for the droves of gamers taking to Steam was, of course, the Thanksgiving weekend, with Steam's Autumn Sales agreement for Black Fri driving slew of visiting, purchasing, and playing of inexperienced games as you power imagine – there are about seriously tasty discounts along the boil, subsequently all.

One of the juiciest price cuts is Cyberpunk 2077, which has been reduced by 50% – the lowest price the unsealed world RPG has ever seen – and this has been selling fasting. Indeed, IT has been the top-selling game on Steam clean for just about clip now, and calm remains at the teetotum of the chart right forthwith.

The Steam clean reviews for Cyberpunk 2077 severalise a storey, as PC Gamer points out. On November 23 the courageous had just 78 thumbs-ups, whereas the next day, that shot up to 2,882, and on November 25, no few than 5,589 positive reviews were posted.

Right away, Cyberpunk 2077 has witnessed a colossal 23,015 recent reviews (at the meter of authorship), and the big majority of those – 84% in point of fact – are Gram-positive.

Analysis: Looks like the long waiting to take the plunge with Cyberpunk 2077 has ended

Clearly there's something of a snowball effect natural event with Hacker 2077, whereby people are eyesight the game with its biggest rebate ever, and and so seeing the growing number of supportive reviews which confirm the sci-fi RPG is in way, direction fitter shape now IT's all patched up. It was, naturally, something of a buggy walloping at launch.

The fact that gamers are noticing it holding fast at the top of the bestseller chart is also doubtless causing folks to think again about the game, possibly check how the patching has gone, and seen more positive feedback on that front.

A typical Steam user review helping to create this positive feedback circuit – the low gear single we came across in point of fact– reads like this: "I waited almost a full year earlier attempting to bring off this biz. I am aware that the launching was incomplete and the game was packed glutted of bugs / glitches. As of patch 1.31 Cyberpunk was a worthwhile game purchase for me. I did savour the nigh 180 hours of playtime I insert."

We'd agree with that sentiment, even though we were brave (or foolish) enough to play at plunge on PC – there were oodles and lots of minor bugs, but we were fortunate sufficient non to hit any show-stoppers (single one that required a reload to cure). That same, we played through at a slow gait, and some of the major game derailing glitches were fixed by the time we got there. We father't dubiousness that anyone performin fanatically at launch would take up had a pretty rough time one manner or another.

At whatever rate, what's happening with Cyberpunk 2077 at once is a far cry from what we witnessed at launch on Steamer, where the game quickly hit a million coincident players at the start, only then four weeks after release, not much more than 200,000 gamers were lul playing. You'd expect the popularity of a unary-player game to drop considerably after a calendar month, naturally, simply non nearly that precipitously (for example, The Witcher 3 took cardinal months for its initial participant base to diminution past a similar amount of money).

Halt out our riddled Cyberpunk 2077 survey
Here's what we have intercourse so far about Cyberpunk 2077 for PS5 and Xbox Series X

Via PC Gamer

Darren is a freelancer authorship news and features for TechRadar (and at times T3) across a deep range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of triad decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Recognise What You Did Last Supper' - was publicised by Hachette UK in 2013).