Starfield was Bethesda's biggest ever game launch with six million players

[midian182]

In a nutshell: Starfield might not have gained the same universal acclaim from critics and players as Baldur's Gate 3, but that didn't stop the space-based RPG from attracting over 6 million players in two days. The statistic means that Starfield is officially Bethesda's biggest game launch of all time.

On September 6, CEO of Microsoft Gaming Phil Spencer used X, formerly Twitter, to announce that Starfield had exceeded 1 million concurrent players across all platforms. It wasn't long afterward when the official Starfield account confirmed that its count of over six million players made it Bethesda's biggest launch ever.

As of this morning, #Starfield has already surpassed 6 million players, making it the biggest Bethesda game launch of all time. pic.twitter.com/4yZa1lAYjW

– Starfield (@StarfieldGame) September 7, 2023

Starfield sits above Baldur's Gate 3 as the top seller on Steam right now, though SteamDB's figures show that Bethesda's game's all-time concurrent peak of 330,723 is less than half of the D&D title's 875,343. Larian Studios' release has just landed on PlayStation 5, while Starfield is also available on Game Pass and Xbox – there are some technical problems with the Xbox Series S to be ironed out before Baldur's Gate 3 releases on Microsoft's consoles.

The Starfield account didn't specify how many of those six million players bought the game outright, were playing it on Game Pass, or purchased the special edition for early access. It wasn't revealed how they were split across platforms, either. Microsoft has emphasized it wants to see Starfield engagement over its sales, hoping that people will continue to subscribe to Game Pass for the hundreds of hours that can be poured into exploring the universe. There's no doubt the service will have seen plenty of sign-ups by people who want to play Starfield without paying the full retail price, too.

Starfield for PC has a Metascore of 87 on Metacritic, though the user score from over 5,300 people is a less impressive 5.6. On Steam, meanwhile, the 77% of the 38,000+ people who rated it favorably have earned Starfield a Mostly Positive rating.

In related news, owners (there are some) of Intel Arc A770 graphics cards experiencing massive performance problems in Starfield were informed by Bethesda Support that the GPU does not meet the minimum requirements of an AMD Radeon RX 5700 or Nvidia GeForce 1070 Ti. That's somewhat surprising, given that our own testing with the latest drivers saw the card outperform the RTX 3060 (and the RTX 3060 Ti, in some cases) across many games. Intel has released another driver that fixes some, but not all, issues for Arc users playing Starfield.

Make sure to check out our full Starfield GPU Benchmark feature with 32 GPUs tested - FSR on and off - right here. We also have an optimization guide to get the best performance out of your card.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/100100-starfield-bethesda-biggest-ever-game-launch-six-million.html

 

[SirDigby]

I preordered the premium edition for 5 days early access, just because my kid is due anytime in the next 3 weeks and I wanted those 5 extra days!

 

[reinisnud]

I preordered the premium edition for 5 days early access, just because my kid is due anytime in the next 3 weeks and I wanted those 5 extra days!

And was it worth it? still trying to gather user reviews for this, before purchasing

 

[Burty117]

And was it worth it? still trying to gather user reviews for this, before purchasing

From what I gather, it's ultimately a bethesda game, if you like their prior work, you'll like this to.

I watched a few people playing this over the weekend, looks pretty good, I plan on buying it myself in 6 months to a year.

Once they've patched on all the stuff it should have launched with (AF settings, Gamma, Contrast and HDR settings, DLSS/XeSS) and fix the current performance issues (Nvidia/Intel GPU's seemingly far below normal performance levels, Ultra Shadow settings breaking frame pacing on Nvidia GPU's, Intel CPU's seem to run worse with HT on), then I'll jump on it as I enjoyed Oblivion and Fallout 4.

 

[SirDigby]

And was it worth it? still trying to gather user reviews for this, before purchasing

I'm still undecided, parts of it are really awesome, parts of it feel very empty. I haven't touched many of the missions yet but I just wish there was some sort of vehicle for planet surface travel, they've tried to get a realistic sense of scale in the game which while I think they've done that very well, I don't think it translates well to actual gameplay.

While I think the game is, or will be, worth it - I wouldn't have bought the premium version if I didn't feel like I need those 5 days.

 

[Burty117]

I'm still undecided, parts of it are really awesome, parts of it feel very empty.

I haven't touched many of the missions yet

I just wish there was some sort of vehicle for planet surface travel

they've tried to get a realistic sense of scale in the game which while I think they've done that very well, I don't think it translates well to actual gameplay.

While I think the game is, or will be, worth it - I wouldn't have bought the premium version if I didn't feel like I need those 5 days.

So you paid quite a lot of money for 5 days early access, how many hours did you play?

 

[i like foxes]

With 5.6 out of 10 rating given by players , Metacritic . lol

 

[SirDigby]

I'm still undecided, parts of it are really awesome, parts of it feel very empty. I haven't touched many of the missions yet but I just wish there was some sort of vehicle for planet surface travel, they've tried to get a realistic sense of scale in the game which while I think they've done that very well, I don't think it translates well to actual gameplay.

In those 5 days, probably managed about 25 hours, but some of that was AFK so real world probs more like 18.
I'm not complaining about buying the game, I just wouldn't have paid £25 extra for the premium version otherwise - though DLC will come and make it more worthwhile later, those 5 days was my incentive.

 

[Thatsdisgusting]

As well as AMD CPUs and Nvidia GPUs...

 

[ThrakazogZ]

With 5.6 out of 10 rating given by players , Metacritic . lol

You can't go by those player review summary scores much, right now. It's being affected by review bombs by groups upset about the character creator having pronouns, and Playstation zealots who have been flooding them with bad reviews, and who have been recently caught calling into gaming talk show streams saying how awful it is, then being caught in the lie that they ever even actually played the game. It's better to look at reviews from your favorite youtubers, streamers, or review sites, right now, to get some opinions on the game you can trust.

 

[Kam7r]

And was it worth it? still trying to gather user reviews for this, before purchasing

it's a better fallout in space, half broken and bugged to the core, don't buy more than the standard edition, if you buy, I personally ride the high sea.

 

[EdmondRC]

I have found the game to be rather boring. I'm probably going to try to push past another 5 hours of it and see if it gets better, if not, I'm glad I chose to use one of my free month Game Pass codes to try the game out. I like Fallout and Elder Scrolls games, but I find those boring at times, this, so far, has been nothing but the boring parts of those games.

 

[johnofo]

I have found the game to be rather boring. I'm probably going to try to push past another 5 hours of it and see if it gets better, if not, I'm glad I chose to use one of my free month Game Pass codes to try the game out. I like Fallout and Elder Scrolls games, but I find those boring at times, this, so far, has been nothing but the boring parts of those games.

Agreed. I played just over 8 hours on Game Pass then uninstalled. The space stuff was a disappointment, just fast travelling most of the time. They should have made it much better. I preferred Skyrim and Fallout. NMS has much better space flight