Can Cyberpunk 2077 Recover?
Cyberpunk 2077 was easily one of the most anticipated video games ever. Ever since it was announced the game was in the forefront of people’s minds and players couldn’t wait to get their hands on it. Many people even took days off work so that they could play it all day when it came out. Those people got burned pretty bad though because Cyberpunk 2077 was delayed multiple times and those people ended up taking time off for nothing.
When Cyberpunk finally released in December of 2020 people were not happy. The game was nearly unplayable due to glitches and bugs that made it into the final product. Even if those bugs weren’t there the game still wasn’t what the publisher CD Projekt Red promised. Many features were missing and the game felt hollow and empty.
From this chart we can see the playerbase of Cyberpunk drop dramatically in just one month. From over 800,000 players to just over 200,000. It dropped even further to currently sit at about 25,000 players at the time of writing and it’s still dropping.
At first glance it might seem like a lost cause and the game will simply fade away, forever immortalized as one of gaming’s biggest disappointments. But not all is lost.
A game that released to very similar reception as Cyberpunk was a game called No Man’s Sky made by Hello Games. But as you can see the playerbase is actually climbing. After dropping to a measly one thousand players for multiple months after the game released. But after working hard on the game for the better part of a year the developers at Hello Games started to release free updates which fixed bugs and glitches and added things to the game that they had promised to have at launch. These updates are represented by the spikes in players.
With No Man’s Sky gaining players everyday after a horrendous launch it begs the question “Can Cyberpunk pull off the same comeback?”. Maybe. It is important to note that Hello Games is a small studio of under fifty people and they have no other products to fall back on. They put everything towards No Man’s Sky’s release and if the game failed that was it their future in the industry was over.
On the other hand CD Projekt Red has already made a huge profit from Cyberpunk and have other game series to fall back on like their Witcher series of games. CD Projekt Red also has over 300 employees and could easily survive the horrible launch of Cyberpunk.
However, CD Projekt Red has expressed that they intend to fix the game and give players the experience they were promised. It remains to be seen if they are simply blowing smoke or if they actually intend to fix the game in a similar way to how Hello Games fixed No Man’s Sky. Cyberpunk 2077 is poised to be the greatest comeback in gaming history or the greatest disappointment.
