Starfield Tops 13 Million Players, 40 Hour Average Playtime Per Player - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 20 December 2023 / 6,983 Views
Bethesda announced Starfield has surpassed 13 million players since the game released in September.
This figure is up from 12 million players on December 2, 10 million players on September 19 and six million players as of the morning of September 7.
The 13 million players have played an average of 40 hours each. There have also been 22.28 million days played, 26.03 million hours spend building ships, 1.97 billion planets visited, and 4.58 million outposts settled.
1.63 million players have become Starborn, which is the number of people who have completed the main ques or about 12.5 percent of the total number of players.
"It’s coming up on the end of the year, and we want to thank all our players for joining us for the incredible launch of Starfield," said Bethesda. "With 13 million players since September, this has been the biggest launch in our history. Your support of this new adventure has meant everything to us.
"You’ve been very busy out there in space for the past few months, and we want to share some fascinating stats about what you’ve been up to. Altogether, you’ve visited nearly 2 billion planets, which is an astronomical number! Check out the full infographic below for even more info on everything from your favorite powers to the most lethal enemies, and more."
Thank you to the millions of players who have made the Settled Systems their home over the past few months since #Starfield's launch.
— Bethesda Game Studios (@BethesdaStudios) December 20, 2023
From highly-requested features like city maps and new ways to travel to official mod support with the launch of Creations, we're working hard to… pic.twitter.com/l6Xs3ZaB4L
Bethesda is targeting updates for Starfield every six weeks starting in February. The updates will include "quality-of-life improvements to content and feature updates."
The team has been reading player feedback and are excited to bring new features to the game including "new ways to travel" and the ability to "access city maps while exploring the major cities." Ship customization will be expanded with "ship decorations, new ship building options, and more."
Other changes coming to game are new Gameplay options beyond the usual "Difficulty" setting. Players will be able to customize "carry capacity, cargo access distance, ship damage, vendor credits, how you suffer afflictions, new survival mechanics, and more."
Official mod support will be coming to Starfield in early 2024 with the launch of Creations.
"Modding has always been an enormous part of our games, with incredible community-made content constantly bringing fresh new experiences," said Bethsda. "With the scale and systems in Starfield, we can’t wait to see what you come up with!
"And lastly, the team is hard at work on the development of Shattered Space, our first major expansion coming next year. You’ll have new story content, new locations, new gear, and much more. We can’t wait to share more with you next year."
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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40 hours is the average playtime?!? Damn, pretty impressive.
When you consider that a lot of users on gamepass will try a game for a few minutes or a few hours and then just drop it, that is a very high average play time
40 hours wow. Amazing, well deserved!
Congrats to them. Well deserved.
Since they're doing average hours, then I'd love to know more breakdown of hours for the 13M players. Such as, of the 13M players what % of them have played under 1hr, 5hrs, 10hrs....500hrs, 1000hrs etc.
The leisure pace for completionist on howlongtobeat.com has it at 323 hours. Safe to say a lot of gamers are having a long good time with it.
I'd love to see a % of how many players put in +400hrs in the game. You hear about certain games where people are really dedicated (just like your comment) and I always wonder roughly how many people are actually like that.
I guess since this site is all about numbers so its got me thinking deeper with the numbers lol
Looking at Achievements, the final quest that starts the NG+ is at 17.6% of players, which generally requires a fair amount of hours. Some players choose not to do that quest because they don't want to give up everything. However, the "Visit 100 Planets" Achievement will usually require even more time to complete and it's at 7.8% of players. I bet a good chunk of those are 300+.
Starfield requires more time to accomplish most objectives than most games. Player complaints about that are why they're adding in "new ways to travel" in future updates.
Bethesda fans often play their games for hundred or thousands of hours. Many of them bought Starfield with that same kind of expectation. Some like what Starfield brings to the table, others are disappointed that it does not feature some of what they loved with Elder Scrolls/Fallout. Specifically, removing hand placed content in favor of copy/pasted Points of Interest has been extremely divisive.
mabey onely 20 percent of players
On Xbox I can see from achievements that 54.07% have completed the first mission. Although it’s quite a long mission, maybe up to 2 hours depending on what you do.
The disappointment of the year.
I thought it would have more total players by this time, but averaging 1 million new players a month since release is solid. I think I expected too much from a new IP.
Well the game getting slaughtered online doesn't help with getting more players on board
I tried the game and loved the vibe, music, atmosphere (no pun intended)... it really drew me into it. But I couldn't figure out what the hell I was suppose to be doing and how to do it, so I quit lol.
Interesting.. You've never played an Elder Scrolls or Fallout game?
No, actually I haven't. I've always been meaning to, though. I plan to give Starfield another try, maybe after the holidays. Hopefully things change. I just really don't want to watch Youtube videos etc to figure it out, because like Mr. Costanza, I like to go in fresh lol.
Only 40? Some of you are slacking.
Iv only spent 20hrs.. iv dropped the average, sorry all.
No that can't be right, the game is suppose to be bad! 😭
The average hours stat is odd. Is this good or bad? Is this good for an RPG? I got BG3 my first run was 110 hours alone.
It's neither one, to be honest. The mean would be a lot more informative than the average. As Todd Howard said, "it's intentionally made to be played for a long time," with no actual end to the game. An unknown number of players are going to have hundreds of hours invested which makes that average not very meaningful by itself.
I probably spent 40 hrs on loading alone
Not sure if you were trying to be funny or..
Well I spent 160 hrs total. Imagine how much loading and time wasted going back and forth,a to b to c
The loading screens are literally seconds.
Read it again. There was a lot of get to ship, pick location,get to space, pick spot, loadinging in between all that, landingship, have a chat, then back over again. A good chunk of my time was wasted doing mundane things. After the 60th hr, the game would crash on average , once per 45 mins. That meant freeze and game restart.
Sure, most of them are literally seconds
They seem to get longer and longer on Series X, the farther you get into the game. 20+ seconds for loading a bigger area.
A game cant load big areas in 20 seconds?
Majority of the loading times like entering your ship is as quick as blinking.
40 hours doesn't surprise me when one of the major problems with the game is the way it intentionally wastes the player's time. I don't know that I've experienced a modern game that has the player spending so much time dealing with constant inventory problems, slow animations, loading screens, drawn out fetch quests, LONG periods where you're just running to distant POI, and crawling around from being over encumbered. I can only believe it was designed that way on purpose and it has frustrated a lot of people.
That 40 hours played in Starfield doesn't equal to 40 hours played in most games.
Hahahaha the loading screen is the biggest culprit
If a game is bad, people won't be putting 40 hours into it.
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