Starfield Tops Skyrim's Peak Concurrent Players on Steam - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 11 September 2023 / 3,795 Views
Bethesda officially released Starfield last Wednesday and over the weekend the game reached a peak of 330,723 concurrent players on Steam, according to SteamDB.
This figure is enough to beat the all-time concurrent number of players for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which peaked at 287,411 concurrent players 12 years ago.
Starfield has yet to top the number of concurrent players for Fallout 4, which peaked at 472,962 players eight years ago. However, Starfield is also available on Xbox Game Pass, while Fallout 4 was not available on a subscription service when it launched.
Microsoft and Bethesda did announce the game had surpassed six million players in less than two days following its launch. On launch day the game topped 1 million concurrent players across all platforms. The RPG also reached 234,502 concurrent players on Steam in its first two hours of Early Access on September 1
Starfield released for the Xbox Series X|S, PC, and Xbox Game Pass on September 6.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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Baldur's Gate 3 is still miles ahead at 875k. I guess a lot of players on PC opted for Game Pass.
I do wonder if it will help or hurt them. Even on the Xbox store the game is hovering around the mid-high 70's. Lots of PC complaints about performance. I suspect many will sign up play/beat the game and then cancel. Articles have been writing how subscription fatigue is setting in across the board. People are tired of the monthly payments for everything they do.
And Xbox... Baldur's Gate 3 was only on PC at launch.
Starfield is split between Steam, Windows Store (PC) and Xbox.
I would say that the concurrent player count is probably WAY higher than 875k for all 3 platforms in released on; esp. because of GamePass (where the majority of users are).
It is definitely higher, Xbox said Starfield did over 1m concurrent between all platforms on release day. And since Xbox seems to likes to round down figures to avoid a decimal point, it could be well over 1m for all we know, especially since total players over the first 34 hours or so was 6m. BG3 may have also been over 1m if it was on all 3 platforms at launch, but since the PS5 version was delayed by a month and Xbox even longer, peak will likely remain at 875k for BG3, because PC had already fallen to like 400k by the time the PS5 version released, and I highly doubt PS5 did enough to make up the difference between 400k and 875k.
MS doesn’t care either way. As long as they’re getting you playing the game. Steam is just a nice option for them as far as priorities.
Plus, BG3 sold like 2.5 million copies the 3 years it was in early access. And the 1.0 update was free to those 2.5 million owners. That definitely helped its player numbers when it finally launched only on PC for the first month.
