'Cyberpunk 2077' amassed at least $480 million in sales before it even launched - and now it's topping sales and streaming charts

• After years of development and several delays, "Cyberpunk 2077" finally launched on December 10 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.
• The game is off to a huge start: It had over 1 million concurrent viewers on Twitch on Wednesday evening, and over 1 million concurrent players on Steam on Thursday morning.
• Moreover: The game's developer, CD Projekt Red, said 8 million people pre-ordered the game ahead of launch.

Before "Cyberpunk 2077" launched on Wednesday afternoon, it had already sold over 8 million copies. At a minimum of $60 apiece, that's just shy of $500 million in sales before anyone could even play the game.

And in the time since, it has begun to dominate attention on Twitch: The game had over 1 million concurrent viewers at one point on Wednesday, and is still hundreds of thousands of viewers ahead of any other game on the service right now.

Similarly, on the world's largest PC gaming platform, Steam, "Cyberpunk 2077" is the first single-player game to take the number one spot on the charts in years. As of Thursday morning, over 1 million people were playing it at any given time on Steam alone - and the game also launched for PC through GOG and the Epic Games Store. "Cyberpunk 2077" is the most anticipated game of the year, if not one the most anticipated game in several years: It's the first new game from the Polish studio behind the highly acclaimed "Witcher" series since "The Witcher 3" launched in 2015.

The game was first announced all the way back in 2012, and interest has only grown over the past eight years.

At Microsoft's E3 press conference in June 2018, fans finally got a first look at the new game. Then, one year later at another Microsoft E3 press conference, Keanu Reeves showed up to announce that he would play a character in the game - and, more importantly, that "Cyberpunk 2077" would finally come out in April 2020. April 2020 came and went, as did two subsequent launch dates.

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Those delays don't appear to have decreased interest, as "Cyberpunk 2077" is clearly off to a huge start.

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