Bethesda Game Studios has announced that Starfield has surpassed ten million players across all platforms, reinforcing its status as the biggest launch ever for the developer.
The news came late on September 19th, slightly less than two weeks after the official launch on September 6th (though owners of the Premium Edition started playing on September 1st). Two days later, Bethesda Game Studios said the game had surpassed six million players.
Of course, we’ll never know the exact split between full sales and Game Pass subscribers since Microsoft stopped reporting that data a long time ago. Still, we know the game became the fastest-selling new IP of 2023 and the biggest Xbox launch of the generation in Europe. It trailed Hogwarts Legacy, Diablo 4, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor in full sales, but that data doesn’t include Game Pass.
On Steam, the game managed to overcome The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim when it comes to concurrent player peak, though Fallout 4’s peak is still higher. Needless to say, Fallout 4 didn’t launch on Game Pass on day one.
Starfield earned a 9 out of 10 score from Francesco De Meo in Wccftech’s review:
At the start of my journey in Starfield, my experience was admittedly rather dull and boring, but as I collected more Artifacts and got involved in the sprawling sci-fi universe created by Bethesda, I started warming up the game, getting to the point that I have some difficulty putting it down. While Starfield refines more than innovates the typical Bethesda formula, it is undoubtedly one of the best games ever made by the studio and one of the year’s finest titles.
Bethesda is working on the first patches, adding brightness and contrast controls, HDR calibration menu, FOV Slider, native NVIDIA DLSS, and 32:9 Ultrawide Monitor Support on PC. Meanwhile, all this and more can be fixed with various Starfield tweaks and mods already available on PC, even though the official mod tools won’t be released until 2024.
