Panam Romance data reveals something interesting about ‘Cyberpunk 2077’

With no news to report on Cyberpunk 2077, CDPR has done this thing on twitter where they reveal various stats about the game. I don’t find most of those things terribly interesting, like how many billions of people have gone from Eddies to Vic the Ripperdoc, but yesterday they made one more revealing.

The CDPR claims that 67.53% of gamers have chosen a relationship with Panam, the game’s now famous nomadic character. It’s above other “main” romance options like Judy, River and Kerry, except… c is a bit not.

Cyberpunk 2077 decided to carefully group four romance choices into Male V gay / straight and Female V gay / straight options. Male Vs can only romance Panam or Kerry, and will be rejected by Judy or River. Women vs. Women can only romance Judy or River, and be rejected by Panam or Kerry. And while you can choose to have a male voice with a female body, and vice versa, romantic characters choose the voice, not the body (probably because they don’t want to record more voices).

So if 67.53% of gamers chose a relationship with Panam, that means at least 67.53% of gamers chose a male V (at least in terms of voice) over a female V. And I assumed that the additional V men who chose Kerry would not be greater than 10%, but could be more realistic like 5%. So let’s say that around 73% of Cyberpunk 2077 players chose to play as Male V.

Gender in video game statistics is ubiquitous. Sony recently released promising data that the number of female PS4 / PS5 owners now exceeds 40%. But then we have stats like this, which reminds me of the old stat that two-thirds of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey players chose Alexios over Kassandra. I always quote this because it’s an example of players experiencing a game that is downright worse because Kassandra’s voice, and subsequently her character, is so much better.

I feel the same between Male V and Female V in Cyberpunk, but maybe not enough at the extreme of Kassandra. I think Male V is fine, but I will say that I think Cherami Leigh’s voice as Female V could be the best first person voice I’ve ever seen in a video game, and she’s got to it. only makes the scenario work for me. She really stands out in a game full of other issues. And it looks like barely a quarter of Cyberpunk gamers were able to find out, if that data indicates what I think it does.

I’m not “scolding” here, I just think it’s interesting. Obviously, it would be nice if a game like this had more female players. And I think guys should step out of their comfort zone and play the opposite sex every now and then (I know some do, but clearly not a ton).

Anyway, where is this free Cyberpunk DLC that’s supposed to happen in the first half of the year?

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