It’s official – Starfield had Bethesda’s biggest-ever game launch. Having racked up over six million players as of yesterday (Thursday, September 7), the space-exploration RPG has soared past the launches of Skyrim and Fallout 4.
The Starfield Twitter account thanked players for their support, and wrote: “As of this morning, Starfield has already surpassed six million players, making it the biggest Bethesda game launch of all time.”
As of this morning, #Starfield has already surpassed 6 million players, making it the biggest Bethesda game launch of all time. pic.twitter.com/4yZa1lAYjWSeptember 7, 2023
Starfield’s popularity is seemingly continuing to grow exponentially. Xbox boss Phil Spencer previously confirmed that on launch day (after the game left its early access period), the title managed to hit one million concurrent players across Xbox Series X|S, cloud streaming and PC. Right now, it’s not known which platform is the most popular place to play Starfield, but SteamDB data shows that Steam’s concurrent player peak was a very impressive 269,177 (also on September 6).
Speaking of Starfield on PC, director Todd Howard was recently asked in an interview why Bethesda did “not optimize this game for PC”. To this, Howard simply responded, “We did; it’s running great”, and added: “It is a next-gen PC game. We really do push the technology, so you may need to upgrade your PC for this game, but it’s got a lot of great stuff going on in it, and the fans are responding awesomely.”
With average critic scores of 86 and 87 on Metacritic for its Xbox and PC versions, the consensus on Starfield is, generally speaking, highly positive. TechRadar Gaming’s editor in chief, Jake Tucker, was also full of praise for the title, and gave it four out of five stars. He did, however, raise concerns about the “middling ground combat”, and the overall “soulless” feel to the vast RPG.
You can kit yourself out for your Starfield adventure with our list of the best Xbox controllers. If getting lost in space isn’t your thing, you can look for more game recommendations on our list of the best PC games.