A Gacha Crossover and a Netflix Season Are Reviving Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077's best week since 2023 did not come from anything CD Projekt Red actually shipped this year. On July 3, 2026, the studio confirmed the game has sold more than 40 million copies worldwide, and days earlier its Steam concurrent player count broke 100,000 for the first time since December 2023. Neither number traces back to a new patch or expansion. Both trace back to a five-year-old anime, arriving through two different doors at once: a June crossover event inside the gacha RPG Wuthering Waves, and the confirmed Fall 2026 Netflix return of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners itself.

• Cyberpunk 2077 crossed 40 million copies sold worldwide on July 3, 2026, up from 35 million in November 2025, and hit its highest Steam concurrent player count since 2023 (100,000+) days earlier.
• The spike traces to Wuthering Waves × Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, a June 8 in-game crossover that put Night City characters in front of a gacha RPG with an all-time Steam peak of roughly 49,500 concurrent players and about 2.2 million monthly mobile users.
• It is a repeat of 2022: when Edgerunners Season 1 premiered on Netflix, Cyberpunk 2077's Steam player count nearly tripled in a month, from 13,407 to a peak of 136,724.
• Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Season 2 is confirmed for Fall 2026 on Netflix, the same kind of event that caused the 2022 spike, this time landing on a base game already primed by a month of cross-media promotion.

What actually happened to Cyberpunk 2077's numbers this summer?

Start with the trajectory, because the two numbers arrived almost on top of each other. Cyberpunk 2077 hit 13 million copies sold ten days after its disastrous December 2020 launch, 20 million by September 2022, 25 million by October 2023, 30 million by November 2024, and 35 million by November 2025. On July 3, 2026, CD Projekt's co-CEO Michal Nowakowski confirmed the game had passed 40 million, calling it "a testament to what CD Projekt does best." That figure covers the base game and the Ultimate Edition bundle, which includes the Phantom Liberty expansion, itself past 10 million copies on its own.

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The player-count story moved in parallel. A record-low Steam price of $17.99 (roughly 65 to 70 percent off) pulled concurrent players to 87,025 over the final weekend of June, the game's best weekend since December 2023. Days later, boosted by the Wuthering Waves crossover and mounting Edgerunners Season 2 hype, Steam concurrent players broke 100,000 for the first time in almost three years. Cyberpunk 2077 has been discounted dozens of times since 2020 without a spike this size, so a sale price alone does not explain it. Something else was pulling people in.

Why would a gacha crossover move a 2020 PC and console RPG?

Because it was not really aimed at people who already own Cyberpunk 2077. Wuthering Waves is a gacha action RPG from Kuro Games with roughly 1.9 to 2.5 million owners on Steam alone and about 2.2 million monthly active mobile players, a young, mobile-first audience on a different storefront than the one Cyberpunk 2077 sells on. On June 8, 2026, Kuro Games, CD Projekt Red and animation studio Trigger shipped a joint event, Wuthering Waves × Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, dropping edgerunners Lucy and Rebecca into Wuthering Waves' world of Solaris as playable characters, Rebecca free through a limited-time event and Lucy through the game's gacha currency. That put two Night City characters, their look, voice lines and backstory, in front of millions of players who had likely never touched Cyberpunk 2077 or the anime; the crossover also pushed Wuthering Waves' own all-time Steam concurrent peak to 49,497 on June 8, its highest ever. Some share of that audience went looking for the source material afterward, right as it happened to be sitting at its lowest price ever, a crossover functioning as an ad campaign CD Projekt Red never had to pay to produce.

Hasn't this happened before, and what's different now?

Yes, almost exactly, in 2022. When Cyberpunk: Edgerunners premiered on Netflix on September 13 that year to a 100% critics' score, Cyberpunk 2077's Steam player count went from an average of 10,000 to 15,000 to a peak of 136,724 by September 25, an increase of almost 300% in under two weeks; the game briefly became Steam's top seller again and overtook Elden Ring as the most-played single-player-only title on the platform. The mechanism was identical to this summer's, a piece of animated Cyberpunk media converting viewers who had never opened the game into new players. What is different is the game on the other side of the door. In September 2022, anyone curious enough to launch it found a title still ahead of its 2.0 update and the Phantom Liberty expansion, neither of which landed until September 2023, and some of that audience almost certainly bounced off rough edges since fixed. In 2026 the same curiosity funnel points at a game that has spent three years rehabilitating its reputation: 2.0 overhauled policing, skills and perks, Phantom Liberty added a Metacritic-favorite expansion, and a record-low price removes the last excuse not to try it. A crossover that sends new eyes to a rough game converts some of them into refunds. One that sends new eyes to a finished, cheap, well-reviewed game converts more of them into owners.

What else is CD Projekt stacking on top of this?

The Wuthering Waves collaboration was not an isolated event; it landed inside five weeks of near-continuous Cyberpunk cross-promotion, including a second crossover into Apex Legends and the final issue of a Dark Horse comic tie-in (both below). None of it alone moves a sales chart, but stacked together it kept Night City in front of players on three platforms at once, right up to the announcement everyone was actually waiting on.

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1. Jun 8, 2026Wuthering Waves × Cyberpunk: Edgerunners crossover goes live Kuro Games, CD Projekt Red and Trigger; Lucy and Rebecca join Solaris
2. ~Jun 25, 2026Cyberpunk 2077 hits a record-low $17.99 on Steam roughly 65-70% off; weekend peak of 87,025 concurrent players
3. Jul 3, 2026CD Projekt confirms 40 million copies sold worldwide co-CEO Michal Nowakowski calls it a testament to the studio's storytelling
4. Early Jul 2026Steam concurrent players break 100,000 first time since December 2023
5. Jul 14-Aug 4, 2026Cyberpunk × Apex Legends crossover event Night City map, cyberware mods, 8 character and weapon skins
6. Jul 15, 2026Chrome #4 closes Dark Horse's comic anthology the franchise's print side-story wraps up
7. Fall 2026Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Season 2 premieres on Netflix a standalone story; showrunner Bartosz Sztybor and director Kai Ikarashi return

What happens when Season 2 actually premieres?

If the 2022 precedent holds, the premiere itself, not the run-up, is where the next real spike lands. Edgerunners Season 2 is a ten-episode, standalone Night City story following four new characters; Netflix has confirmed a Fall 2026 window without a calendar date, with a full trailer expected by late summer. Everything above is the run-up, and the 2022 data point suggests the premiere could push concurrent players well past this summer's 100,000, especially with the game now cheaper and more complete than it has ever been. It is also the backdrop for persistent rumors of a second expansion, on the logic that a sustained, larger player base makes another paid expansion worth greenlighting. Further out, this same relevance is the foundation for Project Orion, the confirmed sequel now in pre-production at CD Projekt's North American studios, which by the studio's own four-to-five-year timeline is not landing before the turn of the decade.

Our take

The most telling thing about this summer's numbers is what CD Projekt Red did not have to do to get them: no new expansion, no big patch, no marketing campaign of its own. It licensed two characters to someone else's gacha game and let a Netflix renewal it announced months ago keep generating headlines on a schedule it does not control. That only works because the product on the other end of the funnel no longer disappoints the people it pulls in; a crossover or an anime episode is free reach, but whether that reach turns into lifetime sales depends entirely on the five years of patches and a systems overhaul that turned a launch disaster into a game worth finishing. Cyberpunk 2077's real achievement in 2026 is not the 40 million number. It is that the game is now good enough that every unrelated show or crossover aimed at its universe functions as marketing CD Projekt Red never has to buy.

Original analysis by GenZTech. Reporting informed by PC Gamer and Forbes.