A five-year-old game with a notoriously rocky launch is now out-drawing half of this summer’s fresh releases. And it’s not doing it on the back of a major expansion drop — Phantom Liberty shipped back in 2023 — it’s just… happening, as if Night City decided to remind everyone it’s still there.
According to SteamDB, Cyberpunk 2077‘s peak concurrent player count on Steam has crossed 100,000 for the first time since December 2023. For a game that’s five and a half years old and hasn’t seen a major content update in a while, that’s the kind of number that shouldn’t be climbing — the usual trajectory for a single-player RPG this age is a slow fade, not a comeback.
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Why Cyberpunk 2077’s Steam Player Count Is Rising in 2026
This isn’t a random spike — several factors lined up at once, and none of them alone would have produced a jump this big.
The biggest trigger is that Cyberpunk 2077 is back in the media spotlight, but this time it’s not about patches — it’s about the wider screen universe. CD Projekt RED and animation studio Trigger are working on a second season of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, set to premiere on Netflix in fall 2026. A full teaser dropped in recent weeks, revealing new characters: netrunner Dee, obsessive filmmaker Roman Karakas, veteran mercenary Wick Kingsley, and the mysterious Talia Young. Season one pulled off this exact trick back in 2022, giving the game a second wind and even helping it surpass The Witcher 3’s peak online numbers — and the same mechanic appears to be repeating.
The second factor is a plain old seasonal sale, and it’s working exactly as intended: the base version of the game is discounted up to 70% on Steam, with Phantom Liberty also marked down. For players who’ve been putting off the purchase for years because of the game’s 2020 reputation, this is the “alright, let’s see if they actually fixed it” moment.
The third factor is the cumulative payoff of years of bug-fixing. By the time the big 2.0 update and Phantom Liberty shipped, CD Projekt RED had reworked the combat system, police AI, vehicles, and the entire progression system. The game people mocked at launch is, in a very literal sense, a different product now — and word of mouth about that has finally caught up with the people who skipped it the first time around.
Cyberpunk 2077’s Steam Player Numbers Over Time: The Full Breakdown
| Date | Peak Steam Concurrent Players | Trigger Event |
|---|---|---|
| December 2019 | 103,329 (The Witcher 3 record) | — |
| December 2020 | ~1,000,000+ | Game launch |
| September 2022 | ~120,000 | Edgerunners Season 1 premiere |
| November 2023 | ~121,600 | Patch 1.6 + second wave of the anime effect |
| December 2023 | ~89,000 | Post-holiday cooldown |
| June 2026 | 87,515 | Sale launch, Season 2 announcement |
| July 2026 | 100,000+ | Edgerunners 2 teaser, sale finale |
The pattern in the table is hard to miss: every time the franchise steps outside the game itself — through the anime — the player count jumps far harder than any patch has ever managed on its own.
What the Steam Record Means for Cyberpunk 2077’s Sales and Legacy
The Steam surge isn’t happening in isolation. Around the same time, CD Projekt RED announced that Cyberpunk 2077’s total sales have crossed 40 million copies, including the Ultimate Edition. That number is remarkable given where the game started: temporarily pulled from the PlayStation Store in 2020, refunds processed en masse, and now standing as one of the best-selling RPGs of the generation — still growing five and a half years after release.
Should You Buy Cyberpunk 2077 Now? A Practical Checklist
If you never played it, or bounced off after the rough 2020 launch, here’s what’s worth knowing before buying it on sale:
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Go straight for the Ultimate Edition if your budget allows — it bundles Phantom Liberty, and skipping it makes the late game and ending feel noticeably thinner.
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This is a genuinely different game now: the 2.0 update overhauled the progression system, police AI, driving, and enemy behavior — old 2020 reviews no longer describe the game you’ll actually play.
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You can watch the anime before or after playing — the stories don’t directly intersect, but the show massively deepens the atmosphere of Night City.
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Check your PC specs first — the game is still demanding, especially with ray tracing cranked to Ultra.
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Edgerunners Season 2 doesn’t land until fall — if you want to be caught up on the lore by then, starting the game now rather than in September is the smart move.
What Comes Next for the Cyberpunk Universe
While everyone speculates about how long this current player surge will hold, CD Projekt RED is already looking further ahead: the studio has confirmed that its sequel, codenamed Project Orion, has entered pre-production — a stage that typically takes four to five years to turn into a finished release. In other words, this current wave of interest is essentially the warm-up act before a long wait for the next big game in the series.
For players, the takeaway is simple: Cyberpunk 2077 has officially crossed into “living classic” territory — it no longer needs a constant stream of news to pull in an audience; one good anime teaser and a well-timed discount is enough. If you’ve been putting off a return to Night City, this is genuinely one of the better moments to do it: the sale is still running, the community is active again, and there’s plenty of time left to finish the game at your own pace before Edgerunners Season 2 arrives.
