Starfield has overtaken Skyrim’s concurrent player record on Steam

Starfield has managed to attract more concurrent players on Steam than Skyrim ever has.

According to SteamDB, the game hit its highest peak to date on Sunday, when it reached 330,723 concurrent players (people playing at the same time).

This is higher than the peak number of concurrent players ever achieved by Skyrim, which hit 287,411 around 12 years ago.

The figure suggests an extremely strong start for the game’s sales on Steam, but this new peak concurrent player number isn’t the highest ever reached by a Bethesda game.

Starfield still has some way to go to beat Fallout 4, which managed to hit the publisher’s highest-ever peak eight years ago, when 472,962 reportedly played the game concurrently shortly after release.

It should also be noted that Starfield is available on Xbox Game Pass, whereas Fallout 4 wasn’t on a subscription service on the day of release. As such, there’s still a chance that Starfield has been enjoying more concurrent players on PC when Game Pass players are taken into account, but this isn’t known.

Further reading

27

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

The game has been played by over six million players in its first 24 hours

Microsoft‘s head of gaming Phil Spencer said last week that Starfield topped one million concurrent players on its release day, but didn’t go into detail on how this was split between PC and Xbox.

The official Starfield Twitter account then claimed that over six million people had played the game by the end of its first official day of release, making it “the biggest Bethesda game launch of all time”.

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”.