Starfield accumulates over 6 million players, making it Bethesda’s biggest ever game launch
To infinity and beyond
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It’s official -Starfieldhad 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 ofSkyrimandFallout4.
TheStarfieldTwitter account thanked players for their support, and wrote: “As of this morning,Starfieldhas 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 hitone million concurrent playersacrossXbox Series X|S, cloud streaming and PC. Right now, it’s not known which platform is the most popular place to playStarfield, but SteamDBdatashows thatSteam’s concurrent player peak was a very impressive 269,177 (also on September 6).
Speaking ofStarfieldon 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, soyou 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 onMetacriticfor its Xbox and PC versions, the consensus onStarfieldis, 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 thebest Xbox controllers. If getting lost in space isn’t your thing, you can look for more game recommendations on our list of thebest PC games.
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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.
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