Hello darkness, my old friend

Online games news Tedious Retro Gamer, 16-03-2022
Online Games Bay

One of my favourite quotes from Mystery Science Theater 3000 is "he came, he changed nobody’s life and then he left", which pretty much describes what happened to Cyberpunk 2077. Again.

About month ago clout hunters of youtube were ecstatic with the news that Cyberpunk 2077 is gonna get the long awaited upgrade. After the new patch was available still there were bits of excitement, but the patch turned out to be far from what was expected. There were two new weapons, few apartments you can buy, slight improvements to the traffic AI and pedestrians AI, but overall it was just a cosmetic upgrade to cover the lacking new content of the game.

Nevertheless there was something to talk about. For a while. There was increase in number of concurrent players. For a while. Cyberpunk 2077 jumped from about 15 thousand to 60 thousand concurrent users... for first weekend only. With each weekend the number of players returning to the title was a bit lower, but still it was above the average for the last 12 months of the game lifespan. Until yesterday, when the offer of free month trial has ended.

It looks like the hugely awaited upgrade made very little difference for the game - those, who loved Cyberpunk 2077 still do, those who hate it will hate it no matter what, those who simply don’t care will continue to do so. As I said before CD Projekt Red missed their perfect moment to shine, back in December 2020 and now it can be far too late to save this title - number of players on Steam dropped to the pre-patch level and it doesn’t seem like there is a way for them to improve that. Not without revolutionary changes and, as last 15 months shown, CDPR is not able to make revolutionary changes.

07-06-2022