CD Projekt's troubled RPG "Cyberpunk 2077" has won the 2022 Steam Award (opens in new tab) in the Labor of Love category, given to games that "continue to offer new content after all these years." However, the award revealed that not everyone felt that the right decision had been made.

The Steam Award winners are chosen by a vote. This means that the majority of users chose it over the other entries in the category: Dota 2, Project Zomboid, No Man's Sky, and Deep Rock Galactic. But in a way, Steam's user review system means that the Steam Awards are never over. And sure enough, a large number of new negative user reviews were posted on Steam in response to the "Labor of Love" award. Many of them commented on how they felt that "Cyberpunk: Edge Runner (open in new tab)" was topped not by the game itself, but by the popularity of the show on Netflix.

This is not review bombing in the classic sense; there has been a clear increase in negative reviews since the Steam Awards winners were announced, 193 in total so far, and by all accounts, rather than an organized effort to cause grief for some reason, there has been an ongoing handful of fans expressing frustration with the situation. And there are far more positive reviews posted in the same two days: 836 in all.

Indeed, this ratio is not that far removed from the user reviews posted in December 2020, when Cyberpunk 2077 was first launched and in its most dire state: more than 63,000 negative reviews were posted, which is a very wild number, yet the same period This is a very wild number, but still less than a quarter of the 227,000 positive reviews posted during the same time period.

Despite its sordid history, "Cyberpunk 2077" has only been "officially" review bombed on Steam once. That was in March 2022, after CD Projekt suspended sales in Russia and Belarus (opens in new tab) in protest of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and thousands of negative user reviews were posted. As The Gamer (opens in new tab) noted, the negative review The amount was enough to lower the game's "recent" review rating to "mixed," but Valve later marked these reviews as off-topic and excluded them from the overall rating (opens in new tab).

This still stands.