Posted Sep 27, 2022, 10:36 AMUpdated Sep 27, 2022, 2:55 PM
Netflix series sometimes act as a makeover. The video game “Cyberpunk 2077” is currently experiencing renewed interest among the community of “gamers”, a little less than two years after its marketing which had turned into a fiasco. On Steam, the benchmark platform for selling PC games online, this blockbuster has broken its historic usage records several times in a row over the past four days.
The title reached a peak of 89,395 players connected at the same time last Thursday before climbing to 97,232 “gamers”, then 122,376 and 136,724 people on Saturday and Sunday. All platforms and consoles combined (PS5, Xbox Series, GeForce Now, etc.), the game also passed the milestone of one million daily active players in the middle of last week, its Polish publisher CD Projekt said.
Each day of this week Night City has been visited by 1 million players, both new and returning.
We wanted to use this opportunity to thank you for being with us and playing the game. Thanks, Chooms! ? pic.twitter.com/zqggblztF8— Cyberpunk 2077 (@CyberpunkGame) September 21, 2022
A resurgence due to the release of the animated series “Cyberpunk: Edgerunners” that CD Projekt produced in collaboration with the Japanese studio Trigger. Launched on Netflix almost two weeks ago, this one got excellent reviews on the dreaded and influential site Rotten Tomatoes, an American film review aggregator, which has trickled down to the video game. To the point that the Polish group now plans to decline its franchise in film and / or “live action” [en prises de vues réelles, NDLR].
Many bugs
It must be said that CD Projekt is customary of the fact. Its flagship license and cash cow, The Witcher, had already seen its popularity boosted by its series on Netflix, the first season of which was launched at the end of 2019. But times have changed a lot since then for the group which saw its reputation quite tarnished by the industrial accident to which the start, at the end of 2020, of “Cyberpunk 2077” was related. In question: the many bugs enameling the versions intended for the PS4 and Xbox One consoles which transformed the expected triumph of “Cyberpunk 2077” into a cataclysmic “bad buzz”.
As a result, the firm sold 18 million units during the first sixteen months of operation when the markets initially predicted 30 million copies sold… in the first year of launch. Since then, CD Projekt has been struggling to repair the damage and has released a slew of fixes. Just before the release of the “Cyberpunk: Edgerunners” series, the publisher thus produced a new update, supporting “Cyberpunk 2077” with new content (weapons, quests, etc.), while continuing to improve it on a visual and graphic plan.
This relaunch of the title bodes well for the publisher, which will launch, in 2023, a major (and paying) extension of its game, entitled “Phantom Liberty”. Meanwhile, the group has climbed more than 11% in Warsaw Square since the release of “Cyberpunk: Edgerunners.” This allows it to return to the symbolic milestone of 2 billion euros in market capitalization on Monday, a level which is still (very) far from the wall of 10 billion just before the release of “Cyberpunk 2077”.
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