Starfield hits 1 million concurrent players, but will it topple Skyrim's Steam peak?

It sounds like Starfield is off to a very strong start, with Xbox Phil Spencer sharing an impressive figure of concurrent players.

Starfield has obviously been in the hands of some players for almost a week now, but the majority of us were only able to start playing yesterday. Unsurprisingly, that also seems to be where the game has hit its highest player count, with Spencer posting on his personal Twitter account that "Starfield exceeded 1 million concurrent players across all platforms," on launch day. "Thanks to all the players who helped us reach this great milestone and congrats to Bethesda Studios."

It's unclear how this figure is distributed across Xbox and PC, as the only concrete figure outside of Spencer's we have is from SteamDB, which shows that Starfield hit a peak of 269,177 players yesterday. Starfield is also available through Microsoft's PC store, but we don't have any numbers there. It is likely that a majority of players are playing on Xbox, though, especially considering the title is available through Game Pass.

While it's a promising stat, there is of course the question of whether it can beat one of Bethesda's most loved titles, Skyrim which has a concurrent player count peak of 287,411. That was 12 years ago, though, and with gaming being even more popular now, it's likely that it will, but we obviously won't know for a while if it can ever match Skyrim's 60 million copies sold.

Of course, the game launched in the middle of the week, and with the weekend almost upon us, there's always the chance that number could go up even higher. But we'll have to wait and see if we get any official word on that front, and we don't know what sales figures are like just yet. With Game Pass being as big as it is now, it'll be interesting to see if that's eaten into sales at all.

If you're still on the fence about whether you want to pick up Starfield yourself, you might want to give our review of the game a read, where we gave it 4/5 stars.

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