Cyberpunk: Edgerunners crowned Anime of the Year by Crunchyroll

Anime streaming giant Crunchyroll has named video game tie-in Cyberpunk: Edgerunners its Anime of the Year, beating established series such as Demon Slayer and Attack on Titan.

In an awards show held in Tokyo, Japan this weekend, Studio Trigger’s Netflix series was honoured with the biggest award, alongside Best VA Performance (English).

“It’s a great honor! We’d like to thank everyone for their support, votes, and for watching our anime,” wrote the anime’s official account on social media.

Crunchyroll is an anime streaming service which offers over 1000 anime shows and has over 120 million registered users across more than 200 countries.

Cyberpunk Edgerunners was released on Netflix in mid-September and was a huge hit for both the streaming platform and CD Projekt, which has partly attributed a recent increase in Cyberpunk 2077 sales to the success of the show.

The open-world RPG saw a spike in player numbers in September coinciding with the launch of its major 1.6 patch, a half-price discount on Steam, and the Cyberpunk Edgerunners release.

According to CD Projekt’s chief financial officer Piotr Nielubowicz, Edgerunners hit Netflix’s top 10 lists in 19 countries, and “the popularity of the anime series, along with positive reception of the update, visibly affected unit sales of Cyberpunk”.

Despite its success, CD Projekt Red‘s Japan country manager Satoru Honma claimed last year there were no plans to continue the story of Cyberpunk Edgerunners.

“I personally would like to continue to work with Japanese studios to produce more anime in the future, partly because we have received very good feedback,” Satoru Honma told Famitsu.

“However, just to be clear, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners was planned as a standalone work, so there’s no such thing as ‘we are actually working on Season 2 in the background’.

“Even if we could make more anime in the future, I don’t know if it would be Season 2 or something completely different.”