Starfield appears to have had the biggest Xbox Game Studios launch day yet

Starfield appears to have broken Microsoft‘s record for the biggest launch day for an Xbox Game Studios title.

When the game was released on Wednesday, Xbox boss Phil Spencer said it had exceeded one million concurrent players across all platforms, but it wasn’t clear how many unique users had played Starfield.

This has now been revealed in a tweet by the official Starfield account, which claims that over six million people had played the game by the end of its first official day of release.

“As of this morning, Starfield has already surpassed 6 million players, making it the biggest Bethesda game launch of all time,” it read.

Although Xbox hasn’t yet said so, it appears that this also makes it the biggest day one launch for any Xbox Game Studios title (which incorporates Bethesda’s titles too).

The previous biggest launch was Forza Horizon 5, which was released in November 2021. At the time, Spencer said the game had achieved “4.5 million players so far across PC, cloud and console”, and that it was the “largest launch day for an XGS game”.

Assuming nothing has surpassed this since then, Bethesda’s claim of six million players after day one appears to suggest Starfield is the new record holder.

It remains to be seen whether Starfield will surpass Forza Horizon 5’s record of 10 million players in its first week, an achievement declared the “biggest first week in Xbox history”.

Starfield was released on September 6 for Xbox Series X/S, PC via Windows and Steam, and Game Pass.

Critical reception to the game has been largely positive, with the Xbox Series X/S and PC versions currently sitting on Metacritic scores of 86 and 87 respectively.

VGC’s Starfield review called it “the ultimate Bethesda game”, saying it “takes what people loved about Fallout and Skyrim and casts it across an enormous galaxy”.