Starfield hit over 1 million concurrent players on all platforms at launch

(Image credit: Bethesda Softworks)

Starfield left its early access period yesterday (September 6), and managed to quickly surpass a whopping one million players across all platforms, Xbox boss Phil Spencer has confirmed.

As GamesRadar+ reports, in a celebratory tweet, Spencer wrote: “Starfield exceeded one million concurrent players across all platforms today. Thanks to all the players who helped us reach this great milestone and congrats to [Bethesda Game Studios].”

Starfield exceeded 1 million concurrent players across all platforms today. Thanks to all the players who helped us reach this great milestone and congrats to the @BethesdaStudios https://t.co/5jFaCyPz4GSeptember 7, 2023

While Spencer didn’t provide a breakdown of the most popular platforms to play Starfield on, data from SteamDB shows that the all-time peak of concurrent players on Steam was 269,177, at around 3pm ET yesterday. Obviously, that means that the remaining players must have been playing on Xbox Series X|S, or via Xbox Game Pass Ultimate’s cloud streaming.

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It’s little wonder that Starfield has proven to be so popular - it’s been one of the most highly anticipated upcoming games for years, but the fact that it’s available to play via Xbox Game Pass means that anyone who was already subscribed to the subscription service can dive in without having to spend an extra penny.

In his review, TechRadar Gaming’s editor in chief, Jake Tucker, gave Starfield four out of five stars, and although he loved the starship combat and skill system, he didn’t think that the game was without its flaws. He wrote: “I’ve enjoyed the time that I’ve spent with the game, and I fully expect scores and scores of people to be playing this for years. There’s so much here for willing captains who want to explore every different station, survey and map out every world. For me, I’ll be left looking up from the ground, wondering if a more interesting version of the game is out there in the stars somewhere.”

If you’re diving into Starfield, you can check out our list of the best Xbox controllers to kit yourself out for your grand space adventure. Alternatively, you can check out our recommendations for the best open-world games on PC.

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Catherine is a News Writer for TechRadar Gaming. Armed with a journalism degree from The University of Sheffield, she was sucked into the games media industry after spending far too much time on her university newspaper writing about Pokémon and cool indie games, and realising that was a very cool job, actually. She previously spent 19 months working at GAMINGbible as a full-time journalist. She loves all things Nintendo, and will never stop talking about Xenoblade Chronicles.