Remember December 2020? Cyberpunk 2077 launched, the internet caught fire, and Sony did something it almost never does: it yanked the game off the PlayStation Store entirely. Refunds flew. Memes flew faster. If you had told anyone back then that this exact game would be pulling six-figure crowds on Steam in the summer of 2026, they would have laughed you out of the room.

And yet here we are. The Cyberpunk 2077 player count just blew past 100,000 concurrent players on Steam, a number it hasn’t reached in years. Nobody at CD Projekt RED is laughing. One of them is actually crying, in the best possible way. Thanks to the renewed player interest fueled by the upcoming Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2, the Steam Summer Sale, and several high-profile collaborations.

Paweł Sasko has been with this game through everything. He was a quest director when it launched broken, stuck around through the long rebuild, and now helps lead work on the sequel. He also has a habit that fans find endearing: he watches the Steam player count the way some people watch the weather.

So when the number ticked past 100,000, Sasko did not put out a polished PR statement. He posted a crying emoji and thanked the fans, old and new, for coming back to Night City. He gave a special nod to the fresh chooms discovering the game through the Edgerunners anime and the Wuthering Waves crossover, saying he hoped it would pull them in and inspire them.

Corporate milestones rarely feel personal. This one does. When you have spent five years dragging a game out of the deepest hole in modern gaming history, watching 100,000 people choose to play it on a random summer weekend probably hits different. Cyberpunk 2077’s Steam player count had reached its highest figure.

Three things, and the timing could not have been better if someone had planned it. Someone probably did.

Cast your mind back to September 2022. Studio TRIGGER dropped Cyberpunk: Edgerunners on Netflix, and within days the game’s player count more than tripled, rocketing past 136,000. One ten-episode anime did what two years of patches could not. It made people fall in love with Night City.

Now the sequel is coming. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 lands on Netflix this fall with a brand-new ten-episode story and a brand-new crew, and the first trailer dropped in late June. The result? Players flooded back almost overnight. Outlets covering the surge keep reaching for the same phrase: it is 2022 all over again.

Two more logs on the fire. Wuthering Waves recently welcomed Lucy and Rebecca, the anime’s most beloved faces, into its roster, putting Cyberpunk in front of millions of players who may never have touched the RPG.

Then Steam did the rest. The summer sale slashed the base game by 70% to roughly $18, its deepest cut ever, with the Ultimate Edition and its excellent Phantom Liberty expansion sitting near $33. Watch the trailer, feel the itch, see the price. That is not a purchase decision. That is a reflex.

A little context, because raw numbers can lie. Cyberpunk 2077 normally idles at 20,000 to 30,000 concurrent Steam players in any given month. Perfectly healthy for a single-player RPG pushing six years old.

Then late June came, and the game spiked to about 87,000 over a single weekend, its best showing since the Phantom Liberty glow of December 2023. Most games would ride that wave and slowly settle. This one kept climbing until it broke six figures.

Sure, the game once peaked at over a million players on launch day, and the 2.0 update in 2024 drew enormous crowds, too. But those spikes were built on curiosity. This one is built on something rarer: trust. People are not showing up to see if the game is broken. They are showing up because they know it is good.

Step back, and the picture gets even better for CD Projekt RED. Edgerunners 2 has not even aired yet. The sequel, currently known as Project Orion, is deep in development. If a trailer alone can do this, imagine what the actual show will do this fall.

Six years ago, Cyberpunk 2077 was the industry’s favorite cautionary tale. Today it is the comeback story every studio wishes it had. Sasko’s tears say it all. Somewhere in Night City, V is smiling.

Last updated: July 6, 2026.