Only a few days after reaching its initial landmark, Starfield has already surpassed their peak concurrent player number on Steam.
As shared by Okami13, their peak number of concurrent players is now at 245,183 players.
At the beginning of the month, we had reported that the game had reached over 234,000 concurrent players. We had already noted then how impressive this start was, given the high profile of other games that had also recently launched in the platform. But now the story is a little bit different.
It seemed to have reached this landmark last September 3, 8 PM Coordinated Universal Time, which is 1 PM Pacific. So this was a Sunday afternoon for most players, a time when many such gamers would have probably found the free time to load the game up and start playing.
We took a look at the SteamDB chart of this data. SteamDB happens to be the database the public is using as we don’t have access to the same systems Steam themselves has to track this information down. You can see it live in the SteamDB page for this game here.
As you can see, every day since Early Access, the game has been seeing peaks at a specific time each day. So there is a definite pattern to the people playing, and it likely reflects that it’s been mostly American gamers who have been playing the game. There is nothing unusual there, of course, given that America remains the biggest market for the video game industry in general.
Our source also has his own opinion on what this data means. Okami 13 believes the consistently returning player count means that people have been returning to the game, and that they have been playing longer and longer.
It would probably make sense that these first few weeks will see the highest amount of user activity for Starfield on Steam. In the coming months after that, players may not be seen playing simultaneously, as they will now be from different time zones, but they will accumulate to even larger total playtime.
There really isn’t much to be made of the correlation of concurrent players coming together in the same time anyway. Since Starfield is entirely offline, it isn’t like players are coordinating to play together. It really mostly reflects the limited availability of the game, which will no longer be true for much longer.
Starfield will be releasing on September 6, 2023, on Xbox Series X|S and Windows via Steam. It will also be Day One on Game Pass.
