What just happened? After years of waiting and three delays, the day has finally arrived: Cyberpunk 2077 is here. It should come as little surprise to learn that the game is proving popular. So popular, in fact, that it's already smashed Fallout 4's record for the most concurrent players on Steam, and has already passed the one-million milestone.
Cyberpunk 2077 was always going to be a hit, despite some reviews being less than glowing---mostly a result of the launch-day bugs. But that hasn't dampened enthusiasm; when pre-loads went live, Steam saw its biggest bandwidth peak since PUBG 1.0.
As noted by analyst Daniel Ahmad, Steam downloads peaked at 23.5 terabytes per second on December 7, nearly three times the previous day's average. You can see the sudden jump from around 8 Tbps the hour that pre-loads began. Ahmed notes that this beat the previous record of 22 Tbps when PUBG 1.0 launched on December 1, 2017.
Steam download bandwidth usage peaked at 23.5Tbps after Cyberpunk 2077 pre-load went live.
--- Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) December 8, 2020
Nearly 3x the peak from the previous day.
This won't capture the full impact on PC as a god amount of sales will also be via GOG and Epic too. pic.twitter.com/RPo4DhyuWi
Now that Cyberpunk 2077 is available, it's setting Steam alight. Fallout 4 had held the record for most concurrent players in a single-player game (472,962 at launch) for five years, but CD Projekt Red's title has smashed through that number in the few hours since release, peaking at 1,003,264.
PUBG's record of 3,236,027 concurrent players, set in January 2018, will be a hard number to reach, but Cyberpunk 2077 is already close to Dota 2's 1,291,328, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive's 1,305,714.
Of course, the important thing to note is that the actual number of people playing Cyberpunk 2077 on PC will be much higher than Steam's figures, seeing as it's also available on the Epic Games Store and CD Projekt's GOG.