It should come as absolutely no surprise that a brand new Bethesda RPG has been an enormous hit, but the scale of that hit is still notable. Xbox boss Phil Spencer recently tweeted that Starfield had reached the incredible goal of one million concurrent players across all of its available platforms. That’s a heady goal, and one that’s worthy of celebration.
"Starfield exceeded 1 million concurrent players across all platforms today" Spencer said. "Thanks to all the players who helped us reach this great milestone and congrats to the @BethesdaStudios". This makes Starfield the biggest ever launch for Bethesda, which certainly helps to justify the enormous amounts of hype the game has garnered over the last few years of development, and particularly in the last few weeks.
However, it’s worth pouring some rain on this parade. With over a million concurrent players, Starfield soars past Baldur’s Game 3’s record of 875,000 concurrent players. As the last "it" game, Baldur’s gate 3 was always going to be a yardstick of Starfield’s success, even if the two games share absolutely no similarities outside of, er, having stats. However, Baldur’s Gate 3’s player count comes from Steam alone, whereas Starfield’s high numbers come from a combination of different platforms. Other games have also far surpassed the one million concurrent player mark on just Steam, including PUBG, Dota 2, and Lost Ark.
It’s also worth noting that Starfield launched on the Xbox Game Pass, meaning it’s effectively free-to-play for anyone already subscribed to the service. A number of those people playing now may simply be playing to see what the fuss is all about, and a better measure of the game’s success will be seeing how many of those people continue playing after the hype dies down.
But even with those caveats, it’s clear Starfield is a huge success for Bethesda, and it’s likely to be a game we’re hearing a lot about in the coming months. Will it have the same lasting success as Skyrim though? We’ll have to wait and see.
Starfield is currently available for Windows and Xbox Series X/S.