Xbox is celebrating a new milestone for Starfield, with Phil Spencer announcing that the game has now surpassed 12 million total players in the three months since its release. The Xbox head also discussed the game’s future, comparing Bethesda’s plans for the game to Skyrim’s extended life cycle.
Spencer hailed Starfield’s success since its introduction at CCXP in Brazil, as reported by IGN. “Starfield has now had over 12 million players since the launch of Starfield, and it still sits in our top 10 most-played games from our studios,” he added.
When asked if he expected Starfield to last as long as Skyrim, the Bethesda RPG that is still popular with fans 12 years after its debut, Spencer replied, “That’s our goal.” Todd Howard and the Bethesda team, according to Spencer, expect that Starfield will be a comparable experience to Skyrim for “people who love space and space exploration.”
“So we’ve already announced that we’ve got our next expansion coming, Shattered Space, we’ve already told the community that they’ll get all the mod tools so they can go create their own content in Starfield, which has been so important for Skyrim,” Spencer went on to say. “So a ton of confidence that for many many years Starfield will be sitting high in the gameplay.”
According to all reports, Starfield had a successful debut, with 1 million concurrent users on launch day and over 6 million gamers within a week. It’s difficult to compare Starfield to Bethesda’s other titles, however, because it was also released on Game Pass, and Xbox hasn’t divulged how many players purchased the game versus playing it as part of their subscription–though Microsoft did tie a rise in Game Pass subscriptions to Starfield’s release.
Starfield has also received less praise from critics and fans than Bethesda’s previous products, becoming the studio’s lowest rated game on Steam, with only 68% positive reviews at the time of writing. Concurrent player numbers on Steam have also declined considerably since launch, with the game now often ranking lower than Skyrim in the charts–though it’s worth noting that Steam represents only a small portion of the game’s player base, with Starfield also available on Xbox and Game Pass.
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