Starfield has now surpassed the Steam concurrency peak of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which registered 287K concurrent users when it launched twelve years ago, entering Steam’s all-time Top 30. It is not the highest concurrency peak of a Bethesda Game Studios title on Steam; Fallout 4 reached a peak of 472K users when it launched eight years ago. However, it was a given that a meaningful portion of players would opt to access the game via the Microsoft Store and the Game Pass subscription service, as per Microsoft’s policy.
We’ll probably never know exactly how many full-price units have been sold since Microsoft stopped disclosing those a long time ago. Still, as announced on Thursday by Bethesda, the sci-fi roleplaying game is already the studio’s biggest launch with over six million players across all platforms.
Bethesda also plans to keep gamers glued to Starfield for a long time between official DLCs (Shattered Space being the first story expansion), free updates, and mods. On that note, in an interview published a couple of days ago by Japanese website Famitsu, Game Director Todd Howard revealed that the official Starfield modding tools will be released sometime in 2024. Here’s the relevant quote (translated through Google):
With mods, you will be able to do almost anything, just like in previous works. Mod support will be available next year, but we love it too, so we’ll do it in a big way.
This isn’t surprising, either, as there is usually around three months of waiting from a Bethesda Game Studios launch and the public modding tools release. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim launched on November 11, 2011, and the mod tools were shared with the community on February 7, 2012, alongside the High Resolution Texture Pack. It took a little longer for Fallout 4, which launched on November 10, 2015 and received its own modding tools in PC Open Beta on April 26, 2016.
As such, it is conceivable that the Starfield modding tools may be available in January or February at the latest. The absence of Bethesda’s toolkit hasn’t stopped the huge modding community from creating all sorts of great mods that enhance the visuals, performance, gameplay, and quality of life. Just yesterday, renowned texture modder Halk Hogan announced the upcoming release of Starfield HD Reworked Project to improve texture quality without damaging the performance.
Still, the availability of the official mod tools will undoubtedly expand the modding potential of Starfield, as well as making it available on Xbox consoles. We’ll continue to highlight the best mods for Bethesda’s sci-fi RPG as they are released, so stay tuned.
