Starfield has officially launched, so everyone who bought the game full price without a special edition, and everyone who has Game Pass, can now freely install and play the game on Xbox Series X|S and PC. But are you wondering how many people played Starfield through Early Access?
PlayTracker, a platform that collects various game data, estimates that Steam reached more than 1 million players. Incredibly enough, Xbox, including Xbox Series X|S, and gamers playing Xbox games on their PC, also reached more than 1 million players.
In PlayTracker’s words:
“Based on our user sampling data so far, PlayTracker estimates #Starfield has far surpassed the 1M player milestone on both Steam and XBOX with just the Premium Edition buyers.
Sampling data comes in slowly, with a delay. Full launch is tomorrow, we’ll be watching the fireworks.”
We should add a proviso here on how PlayTracker makes its estimates. To quote them from their website:
“Distilled down to its basics: we count how many people in our sample have a game and then extrapolate that onto the world to estimate total players.”
PlayTracker further explains that they have a smaller sample of verified users sharing data, and they use machine learning to make some of their estimates from that data.
So, yes, there is a possibility that PlayTracker’s estimates could be off the mark. That possibility of error can be mathematically calculated as well. We don’t know if PlayTracker was able to verify 1 million players for either platform for now.
But we should still acknowledge the relevance of this estimate. It does mean that there is a possibility that Starfield really did reach these landmark numbers. That they came to this estimate itself hints at a very large player base that showed up for the one week Early Access period.
So before Starfield hit Game Pass, there could have been as many as 2 million players who paid extra for the privilege of playing Starfield early. That is not only a serious accomplishment; it also demonstrates the loyalty of Xbox Series X|S owners on their chosen platform.
We do already know that Starfield has been reaching record concurrent numbers on Steam. We had last reported that over the weekend, Starfield reached a high of over 245,000 concurrent players. There is some credibility to the claim that Starfield could have had over 1 million players on Steam in Early Access based on that.
Like everyone else, we are looking forward to learning what final numbers Starfield accrues in terms of sales and players and the like. But it’s not a stretch to say that it is definitely already a huge hit, in a year that has been swimming in huge hit games.
