At long last, after several delays and with all of the hype and anticipation behind it, CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 is finally here. The game had a simultaneous launch on Thursday December 10, or if you live in the United States, Wednesday December 9 for those playing on PC. While there was little doubt that the game would go onto have major success, the numbers that are coming out less than 24 hours of being released are absolutely staggering. According to CD Projekt Red and video game statistician Daniel Ahmad, Cyberpunk 2077 had 8 million units, physical and digital, pre-ordered well before it launched. Of those 8 million, nearly 5 million were on PC, which means that Cyberpunk 2077 had the best PC title launch day in history.
Ahmad also mentioned in his tweet that those 8 million pre-orders will amount to roughly $500 million in revenue, which is an insane amount of money for a brand new IP to rake in. To put that in perspective, Grand Theft Auto V, which is one of the most successful entertainment releases in the history of the medium, made approximately $800 million within 24 hours when it launched in 2013. It went onto break the $1 billion mark 72 hours later, and this also includes day one sales. The two launches are very similar, and if this is any indication, then we should expect to see Cyberpunk 2077’s numbers grow exponentially in the next few days.
As for breaking the all time record for biggest PC launch of all time, the timing of the milestone is fairly ironic, as another very recent title actually claimed that number beforehand: World of Warcraft: Shadowlands. Blizzard’s expansion achieved this by selling more than 3.7 million copies on its launch day. However, as we already mentioned, Cyberpunk 2077 sold 4.72 million units on it’s release, which officially usurps World of Warcraft: Shadowlands from that crown less than two days after obtaining it.
Continuing on with numbers, it seems that a lot of those PC players bought the game through Steam, as it has been reported by the Steam Database that there were over 1 million people playing Cyberpunk 2077 on the platform. This means that Cyberpunk 2077 is now the new record holder for highest number of concurrent players in a single player game on Steam. The previous title holder, Fallout 4, reached this with roughly 400,000 players, but as we can see, Cyberpunk 2077 completely crushed those statistics by more than double the amount.
While this launch has been wildly successful, it isn’t without its issues. There have already been several reports that the game does not run very well on its console counterparts, the PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. While these problems are somewhat resolved by playing them on their successors, the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, it’s still sore situation for those who are playing the game on the older generation. Keep in mind that the CD Project Red stated that the game will need a lot of patches and updates once released, and this goes for PC as well, which has its fair share of problems too. Regardless, Cyberpunk 2077 is here, and it’s already an international success.
Cyberpunk 2077 is available now for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC through Steam, GOG, Epic Games Store, and Stadia.