Phil Spencer has officially confirmed that Starfield has gone past 1 million players.
He shared this message on Twitter today:
“Starfield exceeded 1 million concurrent players across all platforms today. Thanks to all the players who helped us reach this great milestone and congrats to the @BethesdaStudios!”
Yesterday, we reported on PlayTracker sharing estimates that Starfield may already have 1 million players each on Steam, and on Xbox, including people using their Xbox consoles, and Xbox accounts on Windows PCs.
To be clear, this is a completely different metric. It actually should be compared to the Steam public data of concurrent players on its platform. The last time we reported on that data, SteamDB tracked a high of 245,000 concurrent players.
To put things simply, if Starfield reached as many as 1 million players playing at the same time, there are definitely more than 1 million owners of the game. It is absolutely possible that PlayTracker’s estimates are too low.
Let’s put that in perspective. As of January 2023, Microsoft reported that they had a record 120 million monthly active users of Xbox accounts. One can say that some users have multiple accounts, and some are on Family Sharing. So this isn’t literally 120 million unique users, or 120 million people who played Starfield.
But considering that this is the most anticipated game on Xbox for 2023, and one of the biggest game releases of the year as well, we have to imagine that the amount of players playing Starfield is closer to the 120 million number, than it is to just one million players.
Microsoft, of course, has full access to this data, and they have complete leverage on whether they want to share it with the public or not. I assume they will eventually have to reveal some metric indicating how many total users or how much revenue they made on a game to their investors, but that metric may still not be as definitive as we want.
There is also the matter of Game Pass complicating the question of how much revenue Starfield will be deemed to make, but Microsoft would generate that data based on the playtime of their users. And of course, they would also have exclusive access to that data.
This is all to point out that Microsoft does not necessarily want to share all the nitty gritty of their sales data with the public, even to talk about the success of a release like Starfield. We will probably get more information from the company at some point, but as it is, this is a clear indication that Starfield has already been a massive success.
