Cyberpunk 2077’s Steam success is great, but we can’t rewrite its history

digitaltrends.com:

Cyberpunk 2077 has seen a huge resurgence as of late, thanks largely to the success of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, Netflix’s new and critically acclaimed anime adaptation of the sci-fi property. According to the global PR director at CD Projekt Red on Twitter, viewers watched 14,880,000 hours of the show in just the first week, putting it safely in Netflix’s top 10.

This has been a great boon for the game, which launched in a poor, unfinished state at the end of 2020, and has been getting gradual updates ever since to make it playable, improve on features like skill trees, and add new ones like wardrobe transmogrification. While it sold well at the start of its life cycle, there hasn’t been a spike in the number of players since then. At the time of this writing, however, Cyberpunk 2077 is the eighth most played game on Steam, according to SteamDB, and has nearly 100,000 concurrent players, although it peaked at 1 million players.

It’s easy to feel happy for the developers who worked on the project, and to see them being able to celebrate the recent success. “It’s hard to express when you’re putting so much heart and soul into something, and for some of us, it’s been six, seven, eight years sometimes, especially for those who started at the våery beginning,” quest director Pawel Sasko said in a recent stream (via Gamesradar).

It’s also easy to forget that Cyberpunk 2077 was one of the worst video game launches in recent memory.

I played Cyberpunk 2077 at launch on my PS5 with a review code provided by CD Projekt Red, getting through the majority of the story campaign and many of the side quests in the first couple of weeks. Unfortunately, I experienced many crashes — five in one hour at its height — and a lot of bugs. Some