Following his comments to a Brazilian magazine about the recent price increase of the Xbox Series S console in the LATAM country, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer was interviewed yesterday on the CCXP main stage and revealed a new player count milestone for Starfield.
Starfield has been awesome. One of the special things about my job is I get to play games very early in the development. In fact, I was playing Starfield about this time last year and the game came out at the beginning of September of this year and I could tell when I was playing and the fact that I couldn’t stop playing that this was probably going to be a pretty special game.
You never know when something is going to be a hit, but it was nice to see how successful it’s been. In fact, Starfield has now had over 12 million players since its launch and it still sits in our top 10 most played games from our studios, so thank you everybody for all the support on Starfield and making it a tremendous hit.
Bethesda’s sci-fi roleplaying game was the largest launch ever for the team, achieving six million players one week after the early access launch, ten million players by September 20, and eleven million players by late October as confirmed during Microsoft’s earnings report by CEO Satya Nadella himself.
When asked by host Mari Palma whether Starfield could be as enduring as Skyrim, Spencer replied:
That’s our goal. You know, Skyrim is such an amazing hit from Bethesda Game Studios. Talking to Todd Howard and the team, really what they wanted to do is give people who love space and space exploration that same opportunity. We’ve already announced that we’ve got our next expansion coming, Shattered Space. We’ve already told the community that they’ll get all the mod tools so they can go and create their own content in Starfield, which has been so important to Skyrim, so a ton of confidence that for many many years Starfield will be sitting very high.
As previously reported, the modding tools will be released at some point in 2024. There’s currently no hard date, nor is there any for the Shattered Space expansion, though perhaps we could get some news about them next week at The Game Awards.
Meanwhile, Starfield earned the Xbox Game of the Year prize at the Golden Joystick 2023 Awards. It’s also nominated in the Best RPG category at The Game Awards, although Baldur’s Gate 3 is very likely to win that prize.
