Starfield rockets past Skyrim’s concurrent players record on Steam

Having already surpassed Skyrim and Fallout by becoming Bethesda’s biggest launch to date - with over six million players, according to the developer - Starfield has now smashed another of its predecessor’s records.

During the weekend, Starfield’s number of concurrent players rose past Skyrim’s peak of 287,411 set back in 2011. On Sunday, 330,723 people were recorded as playing Starfield at the same time on Steam via SteamDB - a notable jump from the game’s concurrent player count of around 234,502 following its early release on September 1st for those who stumped up for its premium edition and full release five days later on September 6th, when it hit close to 251,000 players.

That figure is obviously based just on Steam players, with Starfield having also released on PC via Game Pass, where it’s free to play for those signed up to Microsoft’s subscription offering. The space game is also out on Xbox consoles, with Xbox head Phil Spencer having previously revealed that Starfield had exceeded a million players on September 7th across all platforms.

While Bethesda said that Starfield’s launch is bigger than any Fallout game to date, its Steam numbers still lag behind those for Fallout 4, the most recent single-player entry in the series, which hit a peak of almost 473,000 concurrent players around release back in 2015. It’s doing a good bit better than Fallout 76’s multiplayer max of 32,982 in 2020, though.

Starfield still has a way to go before it catches the other massive RPG of 2023, too. Baldur’s Gate 3 is sat on a very impressive peak of 875,000 simultaneous players from the start of August, and continues to see daily peaks around the half-million mark as of today.

The strong start for Starfield means it’s currently the fifth biggest game on Steam at the time of writing, behind PUBG: Battlegrounds, Baldur’s Gate 3, Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.