Cyberpunk 2077's player count is thriving through the power of anime

Cyberpunk 2077 looks to be doing pretty well for itself, as the game's player count on Steam has risen quickly following the release of Cyberpunk Edgerunners.

We probably all know by now that Cyberpunk 2077 didn't exactly launch in an amazing state. Whether it was the glitches, or the much delayed current-gen version of the game, things didn't really pan out until this year when the game actually saw a number of big fixes, and the current-gen version was actually released. Despite all of its problems though, at the time of writing Cyberpunk is sitting at a healthy 105,445 concurrent players (via SteamDB). Why? Through the power of anime, of course.

Cyberpunk Edgerunners, the anime spinoff of CD Projekt's take on the franchise from everyone's favourite Studio Trigger, launched last week, and has so far been pretty widely praised. And clearly fans have the Cyberpunk fever, because since the release of the anime, the average player count has been going up and up and up, hitting a peak of 122,376 players yesterday (September 24), which as PCGamesN points out is higher than The Witcher 3's all time Steam peak of 103,329.

This will obviously of course be in part due to the fact that CD Projekt has actually made the game playable since its pretty disastrous launch, but clearly the anime made a large number of players want to return to the game. The game's renewed interest clearly shows that Edgerunners is a great example of how anime tie-ins should be done. As well as the fact the game just received patch 1.6, which added in some content connecting it to the anime series.

CD Projekt also briefly teased the game's first major expansion, Phantom Liberty, which will see the return of Keanu Reeves as Johnny Silverhand.