Cyberpunk 2077 Steam playerbase has dipped 79% since launch

Cyberpunk 2077 has lost players three times faster than 2015's The Witcher 3.

CD Projekt Red's recently-released Cyberpunk 2077 has seen a 79% decline in players on Steam since its launch.

The figures, collated by Githyp, reveal that while the game boasted one million concurrent users when it first came to the PC platform in December, the RPG is now barely managing to hit 225,000 players at a time. This drop has occurred three times faster than the studio's previous game, 2015's The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, which saw a 79% decline in players within three months.

It's worth noting that single-player titles tend to see a rather fast drop-off in players due to their limited replayability compared to multiplayer games. Githyp does point out that open-world games sometimes buck this trend due to their, well, big and open worlds.

Cyberpunk 2077 launched on December 10 but the eagerly-anticipated game was a source of drama even before its release. In the build-up to launch, it emerged that the title could trigger seizures in those suffering from epilepsy. After release, CD Projekt Red came under fire for the quality of the game, which features a number of glitches, bugs and graphical errors on all platforms, but this was, in particular, true of the PS4 and Xbox One versions of the game.

The studio has admitted it didn't spend enough time on Cyberpunk 2077 on these platforms and has vowed to fix the game with a number of big patches. Both Sony and Microsoft are offering refunds for the game, while Sony has taken the extraordinary step of pulling the title from the PlayStation Store.

This has led to CD Projekt potentially facing a number of class-action lawsuits from investors who feel that the company misled them over the quality of Cyberpunk 2077. One such case has been filed by New York firm Rosen Law, with CD Projekt vowing “vigorous action” to defend itself.

The game was pre-ordered eight million times ahead of launch, with the studio raking in a cool $500 million in the process. Since then, CD Projekt has said that Cyberpunk 2077 sold 13 million copies in the first 10 days.