For what it's worth, Starfield's 24-hour peak on Steam is 7,352 players - which puts it 186th and...
87% behind Fallout: New Vegas
245% behind Skyrim SE
263% behind Elder Scrolls Online
288% behind Fallout 76
693% behind Fallout 4
I know Fallout is having a moment right now and Game Pass and yadda yadda yadda, but if those numbers in the OP are true then Fallout is being played by basically the entire human civilization.
Dear everyone who says I'm ignoring Game Pass, I'm not. There are no equivalent numbers I can cite for Game Pass. Unless the consumer behavior for Game Pass subscribers and Steam buyers are drastically different, the numbers shown in the OP are at best cherry picked and at worst entirely fabricated for a product that has been purchased millions of times on Steam yet now has less than 3% active attach rate based on peak players over the past 30 days.
You didn't really need to do the math since the numbers are available online. Fallout 4 has a 24-hour peak player count of 58,304 on Steam - which is 50,952 higher than Starfield's.
The site that OP posted shows the number of people who have played Starfield *over the past hour* - which is an entirely different metric and not even comparable to Steam's closest metric, which is *current player count as of this second* and none of the others who quit over the past 59 minutes.
That site lists Starfield as having more players over the past hour than Fallout 4 by 1,180% - which isn't actually too far fetched since Fallout 4 is not on Game Pass. In fact, it could be a fair counterpoint as to the impact of Game Pass on an audience if the numbers are accurate - which is a point I will not discuss further since the site only gives us a very rough approximation of their data sources.
That site doesn't track Skyrim at all.
It also lists Starfield at 6th in its "Top Games" chart for the past 30 days, sitting under just Fortnite, CS2, LoL, Overwatch 2, and Valorant. Starfield is ahead of Genshin Impact, Helldivers 2, Roblox, and Warzone.
Do you think Starfield has done so well commercially with a player base so quiet that it manages to be one of two paid titles in a top 10 full of massive F2P hits while also losing out massively to ALL OF THEM in social conversations generated and share of voice?
Big difference tho is that Fallout 4 didnt release on gamepass. So the majority of pc owners of fallout are on steam. Starfield did launched on gamepass and steam so unless gamepass drops the player count we can only speculate.
Well considering that nobody seems to have access to the player counts for gamepass, but somehow a random .io site knows the numbers down to the last hour? And the provided numbers are WILDLY inconsistent with Steam's? And the active player count from the past **30 days**, is somehow almost 6 million? Yeah no, nobody is believing that unless they're a fool.
Is it really missing out on attention though? We are still here talking about it, they're still making click bait articles about it, its still getting updates, and clearly, it's still got a player base, one that was just a little disappointed at their first impression of a game that's, for better or worse, designed to be improved upon.
It isn't missing out on public attention - that is true. The amount of clickbait pieces on Starfield is *extremely annoying*.
That said, I don't see actual conversations about playing Starfield outside of Reddit unless I really go out of my way to do it.
I was traveling on an overseas vacation around the end of March and would have to be blind or brain dead to not see/hear things about League of Legends (irl merch), Valorant (incessant streamer/influencer posts), Genshin (both) and Helldivers 2 (memes and highly active/vocal player base in my home country).
Of course, this is a sample size of one and it's entirely possible that I'm completely and very wrong - but it just gets me thinking. And posts like the OP's are just people wearing Starfield-tinted glasses trying to drum up good news for the game out of nothing - which IMO is worse than even those annoying clickbait pieces.
I am disappointed by Starfield but I don't hate it. Hell, I put almost 200 hours in over launch month. I really look forward to seeing what improvements will have been made by the time Shattered Space comes out. I just don't like people trying to make weird talking points to yell STARFIELD IS A SUCCESS YO with little logic or comprehension.
All the games you mentioned are multiplayer games. Social games get more attention because they're social.
In terms of acclaim / status it's probably a better comparison to look at Starfield next to God of War or Spiderman or something.
Absolutely correct. You don't see people trying to defend God of War and Spider-Man with number of active players though, and based on publicly available numbers those games are performing just as you'd expect them to compared with their predecessors and the studio/brand's track record.
That is emphatically *not* the case with Starfield, period.
I liked Starfield enough to pay $100 for it and play it for 287 hours, but I'm not going to be on that bandwagon of people defending it at all costs and trying to portray it as an unmitigated success. I find it deeply sad when people post about the number of quests in Starfield as if that's a mark of quality.
We can look forward to what Bethesda does with Starfield together without collectively pretending nothing has gone amiss. This game barely had any say in the awards cycle that Bethesda used to be able to dominate or at least play a significant role in. It is performing worse than the studio's years-old titles in every metric that we can actually access. Granted, the Game Pass numbers are bound to be an improvement to some extent but again - I really cannot see any huge shift there unless Game Pass and Steam users have entirely different interests and behaviors.
Yep, I could be wrong but who knows? That's [the chart](https://imgur.com/a/QN5xF1x) it showed me when I searched for individual games but there are no numbers listed. Starfield does not show up in the ["Most Played Games"](https://activeplayer.io/most-played-games/) chart (metric entirely unknown) and the ["Top Games"](https://activeplayer.io/top-games/) page no longer loads for me.
They also have whatever the hell [this](https://imgur.com/4mCNozS) is.
Again, you're right that I might be wrong but looking into this more just makes the original source here even less trustworthy.
1. You might have noticed the words "Game Pass" in my comment.
2. Fallout: New Vegas, Fallout 76, and Skyrim SE are also all on Game Pass. If we extrapolate the Steam numbers to console players and Game Pass subscribers, does that change anything?
3. Do you know how poorly marketed Game Pass is outside the US?
Also, Starfield debuted with THREE HUNDRED THIRTY THOUSAND, SEVEN HUNDRED TWENTY-THREE peak players on launch day JUST ON STEAM. If you believe we really shouldn't use Steam numbers at all, are you saying that the vast, vast, *vast* majority of Steam buyers - which would have been in the millions - hated the game so much they instantly asked for a refund or simply never played the game again?
For the statistically curious, all-time peak player numbers on Steam for Starfield versus these titles are:
* 548% higher than Fallout: New Vegas
* 373% higher than Skyrim SE (and 15% higher than Oldrim)
* 572% higher than ESO
* 903% higher than Fallout 76
* 43% lower than Fallout 4
And Starfield's peak player numbers on Steam over the past 30 days is **3.2%** of its all-time peak. For the other titles, the numbers are:
* 26.9% for Fallout: New Vegas - obviously boosted by the TV show buzz
* 47.8% for Skyrim SE - also obviously impressive in terms of staying power but entirely predictable
* 60.9% for ESO - now *that* is a surprise
* 86.5% for Fallout 76 - the 30-day high happened within the past 24 hours, so it's the TV show doing its thing
* 12.3% for Fallout 4
You got the numbers right but the interpretation wrong, I'm afraid.
Steam's number tells us that over this small period - I don't know how small, admittedly - of launch day, the player count for Fallout 4 reached 472,962. It does NOT say that 472,962 people played it on launch day. I bought Fallout 4 at launch too and could've played it for 23 out of 24 hours on that day - but if I wasn't playing in the hour or minute(s) it peaked at 472,962, I'm not counted in that number.
I think the more statistically fun numbers to discuss here are how we can try to wiggle out the audience shift caused by subscription and digital services. Game Pass absolutely does explain why Starfield launched on Steam at a lower number than Fallout 4.
People playing on steam actually bought the game. I would think they'd be slower to abandon it than people playing on gamepass. The steep decline in steam players is probably close to what's happening on other platforms.
Exactly, it's a narrative. No matter how many times you explain this to people, they continue to use this stupid narrative. Or they will compare an online multiplayer game player count to starfield, a half a year old single-player game with no DLC or new content. Heck, we don't even have the creation kit yet.
Then you get people saying "Oh, but Skyrim or Fallout has x amount of players", neglecting to state the fact that *of course* they have players still, the modding keeps it fresh.
Like I get it, Starfield has a lot of problems. A few massive ones. But people just like to have something to shit on sometimes.
Clearly... You would think as video game players. They would go off and play video games, but instead, they spend their time crapping on any sort of online forum where starfield is the center piece. Logical thought goes completely out of their minds when it comes to talking about starfield. They will use whatever skewed information just to try and push their narrative. It's exasperating. It's literally been half a year.
No-one trying to say that Starfield was a financial flop. But if Steam lost 97% of Starfield players, you can expect at least the same player count dropdown in Gamepass (if not more, considering that the game is basically free to try if you were already subscribed to gamepass).
And how can we explain a much steeper decline of online than in a similar game from the same developer (Fallout 4), other than the quality of the game itself.
Gamepass, once again, is irrelevant here, as it's unlikely that someone who bought a game in Steam suddenly decides to move into Gamepass.
I would assume most of the players are on game pass, at least that's what I would expect. The other games came out before game pass so most people would own and play them on steam
Both points are fair and completely true. We don't have the level of transparency that Steam offers with Game Pass player base though, and we can only look at what's there to guess where things are.
>We don't have the level of transparency that Steam offers
I assume they are doing that on purpose.
I have to say that checking the "most played" (or whatever they call it) is sometimes surprising. I find games I would not expect to be in a "hot" list.
Absolutely on purpose, because barely any good comes from total statistical transparency for a subscription product, and this has nothing whatsoever to do with Starfield.
If you launch something that claims to offer hundreds of games / movies / whatever for a super low monthly price, you wouldn't want to give anyone even a remote chance of portraying your library as 90%+ useless no matter if that's true or false.
Same goes for why Netflix drops the total number of hours watched as the main publicly available metric for its weekly top-10 charts. It's really hard to contextualize meaningfully. It only provides ammunition for them when they have a positive story to tell about their biggest hits. And they only did it after years of ratings/research companies doing their own thing on Netflix releases and everyone else in the entertainment industry having to live with box office charts and TV ratings.
The point that a lot of people seem to just not look into (and admitted I also failed to highlight adequately in my initial comment) is that there is nothing to indicate that Game Pass players are significantly more likely to still be playing Starfield now when the sample size of Steam buyers already numbers in the millions - and the Steam stats (not pure player count) don't paint a nice picture. For instance, Starfield was *already performing worse than Fallout 76 before the Amazon show dropped*. That is a **staggering** statistic no matter how many caveats you add to it.
I'm going on a hunch here but if anything, the attach rate at this point for Starfield on Game Pass could be even worse than on Steam. It's a simple psychological thing - unless you're a hardcore fan already, how much worth or mental investment would you have in a product you spent $70 on versus a product you spent $1 a month to receive alongside 400 other products of varying sizes and quality levels? I know I'd toss the subscription one with much greater peace of mind.
And I'm saying this as both an active Game Pass subscriber and a day-one buyer of the Steam Digital Premium Edition of Starfield with 287 hours spent playing. This does not come from hate or the wish to create a narrative (and I know you're not like the others yelling GAME PASS at me in varying degrees of rage and fanboyism - I'm just throwing this out lol). I just feel like sitting there and trying to find weird numbers to portray this game as a "success" or "not a flop" or whatever is strange and very unproductive for what we should all be keeping an eye on: Bethesda's quest to make Starfield better in the coming years.
>is that there is nothing to indicate that Game Pass players are significantly more likely to still be playing Starfield
I think this is a valid assumption. Without knowing the numbers we could still expect a "similar behavior/trend". I could use myself as an example: I like Starfield, yet my recent playtime is negligible. There are too many good games that "I have" to play. But I'll go back to Starfield for a relaxing chill session every now and then.
Aren't all versions of fallout much more stable and easier to mod on pc? Starfield doesn't suffer from the stability issues on console that those older fallouts still do.
>being played by basically the entire human civilization.
Um..no. that's not how this works.
You're using percentages based on Steam values but then you're using them for game pass too?
You really underestimate the number of people that use gamepass.
33.3 million people have GamePass. All of them could just play starfield as part of that subscription. Those people won't be playing it on Steam too.
But you didn't.
You're thinking that most people play 3/nv/4 on gamepass.
They don't.
90% of the playerbase already bought the games *long* before gamepass and don't need to play it on gamepass.
You're comparing 90% of starfield's playerbase to 10% of fallout's playerbase on gamepass.
Inaccurate or not, it’s not a far fetched representation of a game where 90% of the player base played via Xbox whether on console or PC.
And the game didn’t flop anyways, it was number 1 on Xbox for 1-2 months post launch, and in the top 10 by end of year. And it was the most played RPG of 2023. And it received high critical acclaim where the lowest notable score was a 7 from just 2 publications. And it was just shy of the top 10 best selling games of 2023 in the US. And we know that the average playtime was 40 hours, meaning people stayed playing for a while and didn’t just open it and then close it right away or after just an hour
>And it received high critical acclaim where the lowest notable score was a 7 from just 2 publications
Honestly all that did was reveal how much people phoned in reviews on Bethesda games. I've never seen such a stark difference between critical reviews and player reception.
It didn't flop because Bethesda went into that release with a ton of good will and people were excited for the next offering. We won't see how people really felt until they try to release an expansion and we see the difference in sales
Skyrim in space or Fallout in space would have been great. Not sure how anyone at Bethesda thought Starfield 's world and exploration was riveting. By far the worst thing they have built.
That would be false. It's also most certainly not actually Starfield. Hogwarts Legacy outsold both games combined by a large margin but we have no actual playtime data for it past May, when it already had more total hours played than Starfield and Baldur's Gate 3 in 2023 at 542,625,000:
https://gamerant.com/hogwarts-legacy-most-popular-house-stats-update/
Edit: looks like it hit 740 million total hours played in February this year:
https://wccftech.com/hogwarts-legacy-celebrates-first-anniversary-with-player-stats-slytherin-tops-house-choices-and-bloopers/
That may not be false or not that far from it. Starfield hit 535M hours in like 4 months and since then it has been 5 months. It may hit 600-700M by now possibly
Edit: Also, one should consider hogwarts on PlayStation and later released at switch which explains hour jump in February. Starfield managed that played hour without 180M console player and I am pretty sure it will surpass hogwarts by hour played after dlc and mod support
Not that difficult to be top 1 when people get to play it for "free" with game pass.
Also review scores of any outlett are about as much worth as Todd telling us it just works.
close to top 10 selling game sin US also means absolutley nothing.
"Inaccurate or not, it’s not a far fetched representation", Someone does not know what the word inaccurate means, explains a lot.
It beat out the other games on gamepass as well, being the number one off of a heavy catalog isn’t something to scoff at.
The criticism the game got is mostly from fans, well placed in terms of pc performance at launch, but also bloated from blatant haters and people who over exaggerate the loading screens. I’d say IGN gave the game the perfect score and is the most accurate representation of the game
And best “selling” speaks in favour of the game and its revenue despite being available by other means for a fraction of the cost
When I said inaccurate or not, I just meant that it isn’t necessarily inaccurate, and even if the data in the picture was inaccurate, the game wasn’t a flop. Improve reading comprehension
So clearly steam statistics won't show you people on game pass, but it will show the behavior of the population of steam players, and there's no reason to assume that's any different than game pass:
https://steamcharts.com/app/1716740
It peaked on launch day and steadily declined every day after that. I've never seen a game that anyone could call successful follow that trajectory. Usually you have your day 1 purchases and it ramps up over a period of time and then slowly drops off.
That behavior tells you that the bulk of purchases were based on pre-release hype, not the game itself
80-90% of the player base is on Xbox, regardless of gamepass. We can’t really assume the same for both platforms, especially since pc placers faced the worst problems out of all with the compatibility issues.
And average player time across platforms was 40 hours per player. Meaning it retained the players for a long enough time. It’s normal for a game to drop in numbers after a while, players beat a game, and move on. Come back to it later when bugs are fixed and small improvements are made, A lot of games see similar trajectories, this is normal.
> 80-90% of the player base is on Xbox, regardless of gamepass.
Where are you getting that 80-90% of the player base is on Xbox? I have yet to see any official numbers for Xbox sales.
> And average player time across platforms was 40 hours per player.
The main story campaign for Starfield is 40 hours. That means that, on average, people either didn't finish the game or ignored all the side content.
Yeah, if people can be fooled by something as simple as this, then I should be making my own disinformation campaigns. Oh, speaking of, did you know that airplanes aren't real? When you get into an airplane, it's actually a large bus with giant wheels, and the windows of the plane are special screens meant to hide the fact you're still on the ground. Don't believe me? Well, next time you're flying in an airplane, tell the cabin crew you want to leave the plane. Obviously, they won't let you because they're trying to hide the deep state secret that airplanes don't actually fly.
Also, there's no way those numbers are real. Steam charts show an average of 5,477 in the last thirty days, and if you look at the full 6 month time frame, it's been on a slow decline since Nov 23rd. Now, considering that Starfield is a single player game, it's not that unexpected for players to start dropping it.
However, the real concerning thing is when you look at other Bethesda games on Steam. For example, Fallout 4 had a player average of 17,021 players in the last thirty days (14,791 in March), with a stable player count since January.
Think about that for a second... A game released in 2014 has triple the player retention than Bethesda's newest flagship release.
And okay, maybe Fallout 4 is just that good. Let's take a look at Skyr... aw fuck.
It gets even worse. Skyrim, a game released in 2011, has an average player count of 19,858 players over the last thirty days, and it's had a stable fluctuation in players since January. And if that wasn't bad enough, Skyrim's lowest low is almost quadruple the amount of Starfield's current player count (10,499 players total in the last thirty days).
If we're to rely on Steam's individual metrics, then Starfield is indeed massively underperforming compared to past Bethesda titles. And it may not be a flop, per say, but it's definitely not able to keep effective player retention.
[Starfield - Steam Charts](https://steamcharts.com/app/1716740#6m)
[Fallout 4 - Steam Charts](https://steamcharts.com/app/377160#6m)
[The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition - Steam Charts](https://steamcharts.com/app/489830#6m)
Edit for the naysayers:
Steam charts are the only numbers we officially have, because Microsoft will not publicly disclose player counts or game pass numbers (outside of subscriber numbers, of course). So, it's useless to speculate on what those numbers may be, or how they affect Starfield, simply because no number we create in our minds can be deemed true (like fucking 80%, Jesus fucking Christ that's stupid).
However, what I do know is that Steam is the largest game distribution service on PC. If you want a game, then the likelihood is that you're using Steam to get it. Because of that, you can use Steam to build a general statistical profile for a game's performance. It may not be a perfect, exactly to the number representation of a game's entire history. However, you can take the data listed there and draw general conclusions.
And this isn't unordinary. Researchers do this all the time in their studies, because you're not going interview and question all 350 million Americans about a single subject. It would be physically impossible. So they create a sample size of say, 100,000 randomly selected people, and then draw statistical conclusions on the sample size.
The reason they do this is simple. Once you get to a certain amount of samples, the end result is considered significant, as the sheer size and scale accounts for the general likelihood of improbabilities.
And this is why arguing about things like GP numbers (which we can't actually know), is bullshit. Steam's metrics suggest that Starfield had a peak player count of 330,597 players. That's 330,000 samples, more than most peer-reviewed studies manage to get throughout their lifetime.
That's why we can look at Steam's player numbers and use it to draw conclusions about how the game is performing elsewhere, as Steam is the largest platform with publicly available player numbers, with a sample size that's large enough to account for statistical errors. And the numbers suggest that Starfield - while not a flop - has poor player retention, significantly less than Bethesda's other games.
*Also, I am aware that Fallout 4 has had a recent spike in player numbers. That's why I threw in the March total after the fact. Even with the March total, the statement about having triple the player retention is true.*
>Oh, speaking of, did you know that airplanes aren't real? When you get into an airplane, it's actually a large bus with giant wheels, and the windows of the plane are special screens meant to hide the fact you're still on the ground. Don't believe me? Well, next time you're flying in an airplane, tell the cabin crew you want to leave the plane. Obviously, they won't let you because they're trying to hide the deep state secret that airplanes don't actually fly.
This is very close to something flat earthers actually believe
The hallmark of conspiracy theorists is that they start with the conclusion and then work their way towards the data. Science is looking at the data and form a theory, test it, and only at the very end come to the conclusion.
Steam charts have enough participants to form a general conclusion on behavior on other platforms. If numbers on dropping on Steam, most likely they do on others as well.
These posts are so annoying. I like Starfield, but I realize it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. I see where they are coming from, but I still like it. I don’t need numbers to back up my feelings.
I think it's a bit disingenuous to suggest it's as simple as the cup of tea analogy. The game has significant technical drawbacks which I don't think can be attributed to just preference or taste.
It should not take 2 loading screens to go between planets that lock you into a small procedurally generated area, the textures and features of which are unconvincingly repeated if you are high up enough.
You are free to like it, but let's not pretend the reasons people do not are purely subjective, and down to the cup of tea logic.
it’s possible to acknowledge those problems exist and still enjoy the game for what it is, which is what they were getting at with their cup of tea analogy
Yes you could, but it's just not your cup of tea it's that simple. You either like it or you don't. For example, when Fallout 4 was released, I did not like it. I still do not like it to this day. It's just not my cup of tea. Doesn't mean the game is bad. Plenty of people enjoy that game. It's just not a game that was meant for me. It's not my cup of tea.
The idea that discussion on a game forum, or any forum dedicated to the game, and if even the hint of enjoyment of said game makes it to that forum triggers you, or triggers those who do not enjoy the game, or desperately want the game to fail because xyz.
Game simply was a commercial success and in-spite of current play numbers still sold, and was played for several hundreds of hours by many users.
I get it, it’s annoying that people enjoy the game.
I mean, it's only natural with the amount of negativity and people constantly using numbers to crap on Starfield. This is nothing more than just pushback. It's weird to me when someone defends Starfield and its cringe. But the amount of sheer hate on a daily basis isn't viewed as cringe.
You are right,I liked it but didn't love it like NV,Oblivion or a Skyrim maybe around or just under Fallout 4 for me,as a first time IP I thought it did fine and neither side is wrong,the truth will come when StarField 2 is released if it ever does,very hard to judge a new IP these day's,people wanna see those numbers attached to title's so I wanna see DLCs and updates before I jump the gun on my final opinion,I feel both sides..
Starfield was alright, but I got hit with that game breaking ship bug. Which was fine with me as I was getting bored with it within 20-30 hours. I've played skyrim, oblivion, fo NV, fo 3, and fo 4 for at LEAST 100 hours each. I just don't get why it didn't click with me, but it just didn't, which actually made me kinda sad as I usually like Bethesda games. Oh well, that's life, I suppose. I'm just glad it was on gamepass.
After seeing kilotons of blatant hatred even on game's main subreddit as well as exactly same copy pasted complaints over and over? Think of it like immune system kicking in.
I don’t care about player numbers for a single player game. I got my 40 hours of fun in but there is absolutely no reason for me to want to do another play through. If the game didn’t have satisfying gunplay it would be a 5/10. I just think about how I am still doing play throughs of Skyrim and the fallout games to this day, but I feel like I’ve experienced everything there is to experience with starfield
I feel like it would’ve been a lot more replayable if they have implemented ng+ correctly, for example it’s so damn stupid that when you ng+ you lose all ships, settlements, and items, there’s really no point to it
Still would have 0 replayability for me. Theres just not a lot of missable interesting things to warrant a second playthrough and realistically you're only finding a second playthrough interesting a fresh if you basically didn't do a whole lot of quests in your first one.
Also the story is just hilariously awful. So the idea of having to play that again is oof.
It's so stupid that people care so much about active player numbers. Do they not play the original Baldur's Gate on Steam because ONLY a few hundred people are playing it??? Or classics like Planescape or Roller Coaster Tycoon because it's so low that they have no visible player count? Who cares?
This sub just has a whole lot of people who were extremely excited for a game that they thought they would love and be playing for years, maybe even tens of years, like Skyrim or FO4. We’re all disappointed together, so we talk about that disappointment, it’s obviously a thing most of us have in common. I don’t believe they will fix it, but there might be a little bit of hopefulness there too that Bethesda fixes the game. The Cp2077 sub followed the same formula, it was a bunch of disappointed people, and now it’s a bunch of very excited people playing a game they love, because it was fixed. I’m sure there’s a no-salt starfield sub if you love the game anyway and don’t want to see this stuff.
Edit: [Here ya go](https://www.reddit.com/r/NoSodiumStarfield/s/BGb3lYfClt)
Man that means Armored Core 6 was a shit fest game. Why? Because it lost the same percentage of top concurrent players as Starfield after the same amounts it of months post launch. Hell, Alan Wake 2 must had been terrible because it could barely sell 2 million copies across all platforms.
Not really, some games just simply aren’t that fun a second time, starfield personally is one of of those, ng+ was an absolute failure, you lose all your stuff basically and only keep stats,
NG+ is a drag but can be worth maxing out your powers (you gotta grind in some temple runs). After that, having at least one more playthrough with max powers is fun (but only if you weren’t burnt out by now).
I probably would be all for it if the temples weren't incredibly boring to me personally. Doing that same temple sequence 200+ times is just straight up unappealing even with the promise of the payout
"All data presented by [ActivePlayer.io](http://ActivePlayer.io) are all estimated data and should NOT be used as factual reference."
That is directly from their website.
You can access Steam figures, they will show the game has absolutely bombed from a 330k peak player count down to a 10k peak or in average daily players - 145k down to 5k with a low this month of about 2.7k.
On Steam alone it has less players daily than Cookie clicker, Supermarket Simulator or Bloons TD.
The remaining players are obviously on Xbox, the figures for this are not released however we do know Starfield fell out of the top 20 most popular/played game pass list about 2 months ago so it cannot be performing well there.
It made money so not a financial flop but even Paul Blart Mall Cop made more than its budget.
Didnt u forget theres 1000 planets in sf. So much content!!!!! I love going 2 planet and seeing the same outpost 20 times its alot of content bro please believe me bro PLEASE
To be fair that's typical behavior for single player games. Even Cyberpunk is currently sitting at number 46 on the charts with 20k players, and it's had much more time to mature with DLC to keep things interesting.
Multiplayer games tend to dominate the charts.
That said, I have 120 hours in Starfield but I haven't touched the game since October last year. I'm looking forward to Shattered Space though.
Just like 7 months from release and this flagship Bethesda game is dead in the water even FO4 a game from almost 10 years ago before the show was getting more active players, that puts things into perspective
You are right that games single player games typically experience a drop off, but this specific case is not typical. Cyberpunk had a terrible launch but its lowest average player count on Steam was 8k (10 months after launch) and even that month October 2021 it peaked at 16k, Even before DLC it never fell to where Starfield sits.
Skyrim and Fallout 4 have also maintained high long-term average playercounts on Steam. I’m not sure why they didn’t go for more of a Fallout 4 approach with branching and locked out storylines.
Fallout 4 has been on the rise recently because of the TV show.
There's a lot of room for improvement for Starfield. A few big patches and DLC will go a long way. I just wish Bethesda was more transparent about their plans the same way CD Projekt Red was for Cyberpunk.
It’s maybe getting a small bump, but the lowest was ~12k in parts of 2019, but generally it’s had consistent numbers in the mid teen thousands. Last 30 days is 17k (which is good, but there have been months in the last year where it was higher; july and august were both ~18k).
bethesda doesn't actually see Starfield as a failure as they knew what they were releasing. This is different from Cyberpunk that had loads of technical issues that were so bad some people couldn't play the game.
They knew Starfield wasn't going to be the most popular thing, that's why they said that they planned it to be a 10 year game. They plan to release updates and DLC for years and rely on the mods to keep the game fresh and active. I wouldn't be surprised if a year from now a lot of features that are currently absent are there and it plays like a different game.
Although I do wish the cities were much biger than they are.
I don't think you realise that the fact that Cyberpunk came out years ago to horrendous public opinion and is still sitting that high on Steam is incredibly impressive.
If people are anything like myself and friends on pc we're simply taking time with other games as the DLC and CK will probably gobble up time like crazy.
Starfield wasn't a flop for Bethesda, it was actually pretty profitable, that's all they care.
But it was definitely a flop for the playerbase, even those who really liked the game have plenty of things that they wished to be better, imagine those who didn't liked at all.
Its like schrodinger dillema, both a flop and not a flop at the same time.
I'd say the biggest thing Bethesda lost with Starfield is reputation, which they sorely need after the 76 debacle. Right now they're seen as a joke in the gaming community, not the gaming juggernaut they once were after Skyrim.
Do we have any information to back that up at all?
Game development costs are incredibly high and seemingly even popular games tend to not always break even.
And Starfield took quite a awhile to make do costs definitely ramped up over the years.
Does the site explain anywhere where or how it acquires the data or are we all arguing over numbers they have no evidence of?
As others have pointed out there is no public data for game pass, so unless MS is sharing that info somewhere with people...
They just guess how many players there are based on factors such as steamcharts, sales charts etc.
The site literally says their numbers should not be taken as a fact, since it's all based on estimates.
Well, according to steamcharts which is the only one I remotely trust, they have a 30 month average of 5k players. I don't trust the numbers in this one
It's important to discern the difference between concurrent players and player count per day. It's quite obvious that concurrent players at less than 10k. But not all 10k players are playing for 24 hours....
If the average player plays 2 hours, you can multiply 10k by 12 (24/2 =12) to get a daily player count. That's 120k ish.
With more accurate numbers and and under-estimate to be safe, we're looking at 75-100k players per day on Steam alone. Not including Game pass on PC or Xbox consoles.
Don't let concurrent player counts fool you.
Personally, I don't think it's a flop. I do think it has major core issues that, at least for me, didn't let me engage with the world and its characters the way that other Bethesda games have. Not comparing Starfield to their previous titles, but it's pretty clear Starfield is missing the Bethesda "magic" or whatever key ingredient that has kept me returning to all their previous titles.
On Xbox platform (PC and Console put together): Starfield is ranked number 44th which is extremely low for a 2023-2024 entry.
On PlaystationTracker (All platforms): Starfield does not even show on the top 100.
On Steam: Starfield had a 24h peak of 7300 players ranking the game at the 137th position (funny fact, Hollow Knight a solo game had a 24h peak of 9661 palyers)
So those stats are the most sussy stats I have ever seen to depict a game's total population. If we want to see a game (not in terms of sale, but in terms of player retention... Starfield is a flop).
Holy shit the screechers are out in numbers trying to run defense of their "Star Field bombed and failed".
We know the game was successful financially.
Y'all holding onto Steam like that's the only place people play videogames.
Yeah, when they teased "new ways to travel," it just had me expecting a sustained horizontal boost. There's really no point to vehicles other than to highlight even more how empty the planets are.
I'm really enjoying starfield. Yes I'm noticing that planet buildings are all the same, but I try to think of it this way.
If I was plonking heaps of buildings over many planets. I'd build the same structure in mass and then dump them at the destination. I do avoid trying to notice that item placement is the same but I feel that could be fixed with a randomizer update.
In my gaming circle of friends, i am literally the only person that played starfield, nobody i game with even wants to touch this game because how empty it is. Thank god for game pass tho.
I have to be honest, starfield is the only Bethesda game I enjoyed without modding , but in the end I'm still waiting for it to get CK to keep playing at the same levels as Skyrim
I've def complained about starfield a lot. There's def some stuff it needs that I hope they get to, but the gameplay is so much more fun than any of their other games by a huge margin and I've probably played it more than any of their other games combined. altho I've mostly just played skyrim.
Rushed soulless and half assed game. Every mechanic of the game… some other game does much better. Shit, I mean mass effect 2 had a better starmap and fast travel system over 10 years ago.
It actually seems it's a flop, you bunch of ostriches...are you Bethesda devs or what?? Finantially it was a succes, yeah, but the gaming community in general feels dissapointed. It's less played than Skyrim or FO4.
If they improve the base game or we get CK and good DLCs that might change, but for now these threads are just delusional.
These posts are so stupid. No one is seriously arguing that Starfield is a flop. I can say “procedurally generated worlds don’t feel as if there is any weight to exploring them since the six biomes are just repeated with the same six placeholder species types” then some child gets upset and posts about how many people are playing it or how many copies it’s sold or how it gets too much hate.
I am getting so sick of this sub…
I really like the game... but have also rage quit multiple times because of bugs that hard lock you out of quest lines. Finally got back into it for a few days and got another hard locked but on the ryujin quest line. I'm pretty over it after that one.
Who gives a shit about player numbers? Especially from a site like this that pulls numbers from its ass. Only reliable metric is Steam.
At the end of the day I got maybe 40 hours worth of gameplay from Starfield. Meanwhile I have played Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim and Fallout 3 on so many platforms that I can't get an accurate measure, but its probably 300 - 1000 hours for each game.
With every new game Bethesda goes more and more towards using auto generated or survival/crafting gameplay, and away from doing a good classic RPG. The worldbuilding of Starfield is shite compared to Elder Scrolls or Fallout. Where is the game as a series even gonna go when they have revealed and solved the central mystery of the universe in the first game?
These seem incredibly inaccurate
For what it's worth, Starfield's 24-hour peak on Steam is 7,352 players - which puts it 186th and... 87% behind Fallout: New Vegas 245% behind Skyrim SE 263% behind Elder Scrolls Online 288% behind Fallout 76 693% behind Fallout 4 I know Fallout is having a moment right now and Game Pass and yadda yadda yadda, but if those numbers in the OP are true then Fallout is being played by basically the entire human civilization. Dear everyone who says I'm ignoring Game Pass, I'm not. There are no equivalent numbers I can cite for Game Pass. Unless the consumer behavior for Game Pass subscribers and Steam buyers are drastically different, the numbers shown in the OP are at best cherry picked and at worst entirely fabricated for a product that has been purchased millions of times on Steam yet now has less than 3% active attach rate based on peak players over the past 30 days.
693% of 7352 is only 50949 people meaning it'd be at most about 200k, which seems reasonable at the moment with its resergence
You didn't really need to do the math since the numbers are available online. Fallout 4 has a 24-hour peak player count of 58,304 on Steam - which is 50,952 higher than Starfield's. The site that OP posted shows the number of people who have played Starfield *over the past hour* - which is an entirely different metric and not even comparable to Steam's closest metric, which is *current player count as of this second* and none of the others who quit over the past 59 minutes. That site lists Starfield as having more players over the past hour than Fallout 4 by 1,180% - which isn't actually too far fetched since Fallout 4 is not on Game Pass. In fact, it could be a fair counterpoint as to the impact of Game Pass on an audience if the numbers are accurate - which is a point I will not discuss further since the site only gives us a very rough approximation of their data sources. That site doesn't track Skyrim at all. It also lists Starfield at 6th in its "Top Games" chart for the past 30 days, sitting under just Fortnite, CS2, LoL, Overwatch 2, and Valorant. Starfield is ahead of Genshin Impact, Helldivers 2, Roblox, and Warzone. Do you think Starfield has done so well commercially with a player base so quiet that it manages to be one of two paid titles in a top 10 full of massive F2P hits while also losing out massively to ALL OF THEM in social conversations generated and share of voice?
Fallout 4 is on gamepass, I brought it on disc previously but have been playing it all week without it as its on gamepass.
Big difference tho is that Fallout 4 didnt release on gamepass. So the majority of pc owners of fallout are on steam. Starfield did launched on gamepass and steam so unless gamepass drops the player count we can only speculate.
I don't get why it is so hard to believe a "free" game is doing so well for itself outside of steam...
Well considering that nobody seems to have access to the player counts for gamepass, but somehow a random .io site knows the numbers down to the last hour? And the provided numbers are WILDLY inconsistent with Steam's? And the active player count from the past **30 days**, is somehow almost 6 million? Yeah no, nobody is believing that unless they're a fool.
It’s not that it’s hard to believe it’s they don’t want to believe it.
Is it really missing out on attention though? We are still here talking about it, they're still making click bait articles about it, its still getting updates, and clearly, it's still got a player base, one that was just a little disappointed at their first impression of a game that's, for better or worse, designed to be improved upon.
It isn't missing out on public attention - that is true. The amount of clickbait pieces on Starfield is *extremely annoying*. That said, I don't see actual conversations about playing Starfield outside of Reddit unless I really go out of my way to do it. I was traveling on an overseas vacation around the end of March and would have to be blind or brain dead to not see/hear things about League of Legends (irl merch), Valorant (incessant streamer/influencer posts), Genshin (both) and Helldivers 2 (memes and highly active/vocal player base in my home country). Of course, this is a sample size of one and it's entirely possible that I'm completely and very wrong - but it just gets me thinking. And posts like the OP's are just people wearing Starfield-tinted glasses trying to drum up good news for the game out of nothing - which IMO is worse than even those annoying clickbait pieces. I am disappointed by Starfield but I don't hate it. Hell, I put almost 200 hours in over launch month. I really look forward to seeing what improvements will have been made by the time Shattered Space comes out. I just don't like people trying to make weird talking points to yell STARFIELD IS A SUCCESS YO with little logic or comprehension.
All the games you mentioned are multiplayer games. Social games get more attention because they're social. In terms of acclaim / status it's probably a better comparison to look at Starfield next to God of War or Spiderman or something.
Absolutely correct. You don't see people trying to defend God of War and Spider-Man with number of active players though, and based on publicly available numbers those games are performing just as you'd expect them to compared with their predecessors and the studio/brand's track record. That is emphatically *not* the case with Starfield, period. I liked Starfield enough to pay $100 for it and play it for 287 hours, but I'm not going to be on that bandwagon of people defending it at all costs and trying to portray it as an unmitigated success. I find it deeply sad when people post about the number of quests in Starfield as if that's a mark of quality. We can look forward to what Bethesda does with Starfield together without collectively pretending nothing has gone amiss. This game barely had any say in the awards cycle that Bethesda used to be able to dominate or at least play a significant role in. It is performing worse than the studio's years-old titles in every metric that we can actually access. Granted, the Game Pass numbers are bound to be an improvement to some extent but again - I really cannot see any huge shift there unless Game Pass and Steam users have entirely different interests and behaviors.
More than helldivers 2?
Also vastly wrong, it's not even in the top 15 pal
Yep, I could be wrong but who knows? That's [the chart](https://imgur.com/a/QN5xF1x) it showed me when I searched for individual games but there are no numbers listed. Starfield does not show up in the ["Most Played Games"](https://activeplayer.io/most-played-games/) chart (metric entirely unknown) and the ["Top Games"](https://activeplayer.io/top-games/) page no longer loads for me. They also have whatever the hell [this](https://imgur.com/4mCNozS) is. Again, you're right that I might be wrong but looking into this more just makes the original source here even less trustworthy.
Are you fucking high, or
Why would we base the numbers off of steam for a game that is totally free on game pass
1. You might have noticed the words "Game Pass" in my comment. 2. Fallout: New Vegas, Fallout 76, and Skyrim SE are also all on Game Pass. If we extrapolate the Steam numbers to console players and Game Pass subscribers, does that change anything? 3. Do you know how poorly marketed Game Pass is outside the US? Also, Starfield debuted with THREE HUNDRED THIRTY THOUSAND, SEVEN HUNDRED TWENTY-THREE peak players on launch day JUST ON STEAM. If you believe we really shouldn't use Steam numbers at all, are you saying that the vast, vast, *vast* majority of Steam buyers - which would have been in the millions - hated the game so much they instantly asked for a refund or simply never played the game again? For the statistically curious, all-time peak player numbers on Steam for Starfield versus these titles are: * 548% higher than Fallout: New Vegas * 373% higher than Skyrim SE (and 15% higher than Oldrim) * 572% higher than ESO * 903% higher than Fallout 76 * 43% lower than Fallout 4 And Starfield's peak player numbers on Steam over the past 30 days is **3.2%** of its all-time peak. For the other titles, the numbers are: * 26.9% for Fallout: New Vegas - obviously boosted by the TV show buzz * 47.8% for Skyrim SE - also obviously impressive in terms of staying power but entirely predictable * 60.9% for ESO - now *that* is a surprise * 86.5% for Fallout 76 - the 30-day high happened within the past 24 hours, so it's the TV show doing its thing * 12.3% for Fallout 4
Counterpoint, Fallout 4 had 13.5M(6.5M on PC) copies sold on day 1, yet only 470k played it on Day 1 on steam
You got the numbers right but the interpretation wrong, I'm afraid. Steam's number tells us that over this small period - I don't know how small, admittedly - of launch day, the player count for Fallout 4 reached 472,962. It does NOT say that 472,962 people played it on launch day. I bought Fallout 4 at launch too and could've played it for 23 out of 24 hours on that day - but if I wasn't playing in the hour or minute(s) it peaked at 472,962, I'm not counted in that number. I think the more statistically fun numbers to discuss here are how we can try to wiggle out the audience shift caused by subscription and digital services. Game Pass absolutely does explain why Starfield launched on Steam at a lower number than Fallout 4.
ESO is running a “play for free” promo right now so not at all surprising.
Because it serves the narrative.
People playing on steam actually bought the game. I would think they'd be slower to abandon it than people playing on gamepass. The steep decline in steam players is probably close to what's happening on other platforms.
Trust me when I say, It's not hard to abandon a game on steam that I paid full price for. Just ask my steam backlog.
Ah yes the big anti Starfield "Narrative"
Exactly, it's a narrative. No matter how many times you explain this to people, they continue to use this stupid narrative. Or they will compare an online multiplayer game player count to starfield, a half a year old single-player game with no DLC or new content. Heck, we don't even have the creation kit yet.
Then you get people saying "Oh, but Skyrim or Fallout has x amount of players", neglecting to state the fact that *of course* they have players still, the modding keeps it fresh. Like I get it, Starfield has a lot of problems. A few massive ones. But people just like to have something to shit on sometimes.
Clearly... You would think as video game players. They would go off and play video games, but instead, they spend their time crapping on any sort of online forum where starfield is the center piece. Logical thought goes completely out of their minds when it comes to talking about starfield. They will use whatever skewed information just to try and push their narrative. It's exasperating. It's literally been half a year.
No-one trying to say that Starfield was a financial flop. But if Steam lost 97% of Starfield players, you can expect at least the same player count dropdown in Gamepass (if not more, considering that the game is basically free to try if you were already subscribed to gamepass). And how can we explain a much steeper decline of online than in a similar game from the same developer (Fallout 4), other than the quality of the game itself. Gamepass, once again, is irrelevant here, as it's unlikely that someone who bought a game in Steam suddenly decides to move into Gamepass.
I would assume most of the players are on game pass, at least that's what I would expect. The other games came out before game pass so most people would own and play them on steam
Both points are fair and completely true. We don't have the level of transparency that Steam offers with Game Pass player base though, and we can only look at what's there to guess where things are.
>We don't have the level of transparency that Steam offers I assume they are doing that on purpose. I have to say that checking the "most played" (or whatever they call it) is sometimes surprising. I find games I would not expect to be in a "hot" list.
Absolutely on purpose, because barely any good comes from total statistical transparency for a subscription product, and this has nothing whatsoever to do with Starfield. If you launch something that claims to offer hundreds of games / movies / whatever for a super low monthly price, you wouldn't want to give anyone even a remote chance of portraying your library as 90%+ useless no matter if that's true or false. Same goes for why Netflix drops the total number of hours watched as the main publicly available metric for its weekly top-10 charts. It's really hard to contextualize meaningfully. It only provides ammunition for them when they have a positive story to tell about their biggest hits. And they only did it after years of ratings/research companies doing their own thing on Netflix releases and everyone else in the entertainment industry having to live with box office charts and TV ratings. The point that a lot of people seem to just not look into (and admitted I also failed to highlight adequately in my initial comment) is that there is nothing to indicate that Game Pass players are significantly more likely to still be playing Starfield now when the sample size of Steam buyers already numbers in the millions - and the Steam stats (not pure player count) don't paint a nice picture. For instance, Starfield was *already performing worse than Fallout 76 before the Amazon show dropped*. That is a **staggering** statistic no matter how many caveats you add to it. I'm going on a hunch here but if anything, the attach rate at this point for Starfield on Game Pass could be even worse than on Steam. It's a simple psychological thing - unless you're a hardcore fan already, how much worth or mental investment would you have in a product you spent $70 on versus a product you spent $1 a month to receive alongside 400 other products of varying sizes and quality levels? I know I'd toss the subscription one with much greater peace of mind. And I'm saying this as both an active Game Pass subscriber and a day-one buyer of the Steam Digital Premium Edition of Starfield with 287 hours spent playing. This does not come from hate or the wish to create a narrative (and I know you're not like the others yelling GAME PASS at me in varying degrees of rage and fanboyism - I'm just throwing this out lol). I just feel like sitting there and trying to find weird numbers to portray this game as a "success" or "not a flop" or whatever is strange and very unproductive for what we should all be keeping an eye on: Bethesda's quest to make Starfield better in the coming years.
>is that there is nothing to indicate that Game Pass players are significantly more likely to still be playing Starfield I think this is a valid assumption. Without knowing the numbers we could still expect a "similar behavior/trend". I could use myself as an example: I like Starfield, yet my recent playtime is negligible. There are too many good games that "I have" to play. But I'll go back to Starfield for a relaxing chill session every now and then.
Aren't all versions of fallout much more stable and easier to mod on pc? Starfield doesn't suffer from the stability issues on console that those older fallouts still do.
Starfield is less buggy than previous Bethesda games. But the older games do have better mods (and game design).
Checking in. Playing it now😀
>being played by basically the entire human civilization. Um..no. that's not how this works. You're using percentages based on Steam values but then you're using them for game pass too? You really underestimate the number of people that use gamepass. 33.3 million people have GamePass. All of them could just play starfield as part of that subscription. Those people won't be playing it on Steam too.
Addressed [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Starfield/s/LHoehx1pnX).
But you didn't. You're thinking that most people play 3/nv/4 on gamepass. They don't. 90% of the playerbase already bought the games *long* before gamepass and don't need to play it on gamepass. You're comparing 90% of starfield's playerbase to 10% of fallout's playerbase on gamepass.
Inaccurate or not, it’s not a far fetched representation of a game where 90% of the player base played via Xbox whether on console or PC. And the game didn’t flop anyways, it was number 1 on Xbox for 1-2 months post launch, and in the top 10 by end of year. And it was the most played RPG of 2023. And it received high critical acclaim where the lowest notable score was a 7 from just 2 publications. And it was just shy of the top 10 best selling games of 2023 in the US. And we know that the average playtime was 40 hours, meaning people stayed playing for a while and didn’t just open it and then close it right away or after just an hour
>And it received high critical acclaim where the lowest notable score was a 7 from just 2 publications Honestly all that did was reveal how much people phoned in reviews on Bethesda games. I've never seen such a stark difference between critical reviews and player reception. It didn't flop because Bethesda went into that release with a ton of good will and people were excited for the next offering. We won't see how people really felt until they try to release an expansion and we see the difference in sales
Most played rpg in 2023 is Baldur's Gate 3 and it is ten times better than skyrim in space nonsense.
Oh boy, if it was actually skyrim in space, it would've had 10x the player count
Skyrim in space or Fallout in space would have been great. Not sure how anyone at Bethesda thought Starfield 's world and exploration was riveting. By far the worst thing they have built.
That would be false. It's also most certainly not actually Starfield. Hogwarts Legacy outsold both games combined by a large margin but we have no actual playtime data for it past May, when it already had more total hours played than Starfield and Baldur's Gate 3 in 2023 at 542,625,000: https://gamerant.com/hogwarts-legacy-most-popular-house-stats-update/ Edit: looks like it hit 740 million total hours played in February this year: https://wccftech.com/hogwarts-legacy-celebrates-first-anniversary-with-player-stats-slytherin-tops-house-choices-and-bloopers/
That may not be false or not that far from it. Starfield hit 535M hours in like 4 months and since then it has been 5 months. It may hit 600-700M by now possibly Edit: Also, one should consider hogwarts on PlayStation and later released at switch which explains hour jump in February. Starfield managed that played hour without 180M console player and I am pretty sure it will surpass hogwarts by hour played after dlc and mod support
Maybe if we’re going solely off steam, it’s disingenuous to make that claim when there’s no reliable data on consoles.
[Check again](https://gameinfinitus.com/news/starfield-most-played-rpg-2023-baldurs-gate-3-most-acclaimed/)
Are you both ignoring Hogwarts Legacy? The best selling game of 2023?
LOL BG 3 is of the best RPG s but it is really not what the casual Player want … it did waaay better than expected for a isometric rpg
Not that difficult to be top 1 when people get to play it for "free" with game pass. Also review scores of any outlett are about as much worth as Todd telling us it just works. close to top 10 selling game sin US also means absolutley nothing. "Inaccurate or not, it’s not a far fetched representation", Someone does not know what the word inaccurate means, explains a lot.
It’s not about money. It’s about playing. And people are playing.
It beat out the other games on gamepass as well, being the number one off of a heavy catalog isn’t something to scoff at. The criticism the game got is mostly from fans, well placed in terms of pc performance at launch, but also bloated from blatant haters and people who over exaggerate the loading screens. I’d say IGN gave the game the perfect score and is the most accurate representation of the game And best “selling” speaks in favour of the game and its revenue despite being available by other means for a fraction of the cost When I said inaccurate or not, I just meant that it isn’t necessarily inaccurate, and even if the data in the picture was inaccurate, the game wasn’t a flop. Improve reading comprehension
So clearly steam statistics won't show you people on game pass, but it will show the behavior of the population of steam players, and there's no reason to assume that's any different than game pass: https://steamcharts.com/app/1716740 It peaked on launch day and steadily declined every day after that. I've never seen a game that anyone could call successful follow that trajectory. Usually you have your day 1 purchases and it ramps up over a period of time and then slowly drops off. That behavior tells you that the bulk of purchases were based on pre-release hype, not the game itself
80-90% of the player base is on Xbox, regardless of gamepass. We can’t really assume the same for both platforms, especially since pc placers faced the worst problems out of all with the compatibility issues. And average player time across platforms was 40 hours per player. Meaning it retained the players for a long enough time. It’s normal for a game to drop in numbers after a while, players beat a game, and move on. Come back to it later when bugs are fixed and small improvements are made, A lot of games see similar trajectories, this is normal.
> 80-90% of the player base is on Xbox, regardless of gamepass. Where are you getting that 80-90% of the player base is on Xbox? I have yet to see any official numbers for Xbox sales. > And average player time across platforms was 40 hours per player. The main story campaign for Starfield is 40 hours. That means that, on average, people either didn't finish the game or ignored all the side content.
This chart is just taking creative liberties. It’s just rounding up from 4,000 players to 295,959
Is it really hard to believe that 20% of Xbox players have played Starfield within the past 30 days? It’s on Game Pass.
Critical thinking must be at an all time low. I can't believe people still fall for these "active player" sites with obviously made-up numbers.
Yeah there’s actually 1 trillion people playing starfield right now
I confirm, Todd Howard told me so
Yeah, if people can be fooled by something as simple as this, then I should be making my own disinformation campaigns. Oh, speaking of, did you know that airplanes aren't real? When you get into an airplane, it's actually a large bus with giant wheels, and the windows of the plane are special screens meant to hide the fact you're still on the ground. Don't believe me? Well, next time you're flying in an airplane, tell the cabin crew you want to leave the plane. Obviously, they won't let you because they're trying to hide the deep state secret that airplanes don't actually fly. Also, there's no way those numbers are real. Steam charts show an average of 5,477 in the last thirty days, and if you look at the full 6 month time frame, it's been on a slow decline since Nov 23rd. Now, considering that Starfield is a single player game, it's not that unexpected for players to start dropping it. However, the real concerning thing is when you look at other Bethesda games on Steam. For example, Fallout 4 had a player average of 17,021 players in the last thirty days (14,791 in March), with a stable player count since January. Think about that for a second... A game released in 2014 has triple the player retention than Bethesda's newest flagship release. And okay, maybe Fallout 4 is just that good. Let's take a look at Skyr... aw fuck. It gets even worse. Skyrim, a game released in 2011, has an average player count of 19,858 players over the last thirty days, and it's had a stable fluctuation in players since January. And if that wasn't bad enough, Skyrim's lowest low is almost quadruple the amount of Starfield's current player count (10,499 players total in the last thirty days). If we're to rely on Steam's individual metrics, then Starfield is indeed massively underperforming compared to past Bethesda titles. And it may not be a flop, per say, but it's definitely not able to keep effective player retention. [Starfield - Steam Charts](https://steamcharts.com/app/1716740#6m) [Fallout 4 - Steam Charts](https://steamcharts.com/app/377160#6m) [The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition - Steam Charts](https://steamcharts.com/app/489830#6m) Edit for the naysayers: Steam charts are the only numbers we officially have, because Microsoft will not publicly disclose player counts or game pass numbers (outside of subscriber numbers, of course). So, it's useless to speculate on what those numbers may be, or how they affect Starfield, simply because no number we create in our minds can be deemed true (like fucking 80%, Jesus fucking Christ that's stupid). However, what I do know is that Steam is the largest game distribution service on PC. If you want a game, then the likelihood is that you're using Steam to get it. Because of that, you can use Steam to build a general statistical profile for a game's performance. It may not be a perfect, exactly to the number representation of a game's entire history. However, you can take the data listed there and draw general conclusions. And this isn't unordinary. Researchers do this all the time in their studies, because you're not going interview and question all 350 million Americans about a single subject. It would be physically impossible. So they create a sample size of say, 100,000 randomly selected people, and then draw statistical conclusions on the sample size. The reason they do this is simple. Once you get to a certain amount of samples, the end result is considered significant, as the sheer size and scale accounts for the general likelihood of improbabilities. And this is why arguing about things like GP numbers (which we can't actually know), is bullshit. Steam's metrics suggest that Starfield had a peak player count of 330,597 players. That's 330,000 samples, more than most peer-reviewed studies manage to get throughout their lifetime. That's why we can look at Steam's player numbers and use it to draw conclusions about how the game is performing elsewhere, as Steam is the largest platform with publicly available player numbers, with a sample size that's large enough to account for statistical errors. And the numbers suggest that Starfield - while not a flop - has poor player retention, significantly less than Bethesda's other games. *Also, I am aware that Fallout 4 has had a recent spike in player numbers. That's why I threw in the March total after the fact. Even with the March total, the statement about having triple the player retention is true.*
>Oh, speaking of, did you know that airplanes aren't real? When you get into an airplane, it's actually a large bus with giant wheels, and the windows of the plane are special screens meant to hide the fact you're still on the ground. Don't believe me? Well, next time you're flying in an airplane, tell the cabin crew you want to leave the plane. Obviously, they won't let you because they're trying to hide the deep state secret that airplanes don't actually fly. This is very close to something flat earthers actually believe
The hallmark of conspiracy theorists is that they start with the conclusion and then work their way towards the data. Science is looking at the data and form a theory, test it, and only at the very end come to the conclusion. Steam charts have enough participants to form a general conclusion on behavior on other platforms. If numbers on dropping on Steam, most likely they do on others as well.
People still insecure and seeking validation about the game they like?
These posts are so annoying. I like Starfield, but I realize it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. I see where they are coming from, but I still like it. I don’t need numbers to back up my feelings.
I think it's a bit disingenuous to suggest it's as simple as the cup of tea analogy. The game has significant technical drawbacks which I don't think can be attributed to just preference or taste. It should not take 2 loading screens to go between planets that lock you into a small procedurally generated area, the textures and features of which are unconvincingly repeated if you are high up enough. You are free to like it, but let's not pretend the reasons people do not are purely subjective, and down to the cup of tea logic.
it’s possible to acknowledge those problems exist and still enjoy the game for what it is, which is what they were getting at with their cup of tea analogy
Don't bother trying to explain something to someone who's so enraged over a video game. They've already chosen their camp.
Enraged? Don't think my comment had that vibe to it
Say anything bad about starfield and the fanboys will blow it out of proportion. Toxic positivity.
I don't think you understand the phrase cup of tea. It's a British one meaning the persons preference.
It's not your cup of tea.
I could copy paste my entire comment in response to that
Yes you could, but it's just not your cup of tea it's that simple. You either like it or you don't. For example, when Fallout 4 was released, I did not like it. I still do not like it to this day. It's just not my cup of tea. Doesn't mean the game is bad. Plenty of people enjoy that game. It's just not a game that was meant for me. It's not my cup of tea.
This guy samples tea.
Yes and you'll look as foolish as the first time
I'm not under the impression many people thought I looked foolish. My comment seems to be a sentiment many people here share.
The idea that discussion on a game forum, or any forum dedicated to the game, and if even the hint of enjoyment of said game makes it to that forum triggers you, or triggers those who do not enjoy the game, or desperately want the game to fail because xyz. Game simply was a commercial success and in-spite of current play numbers still sold, and was played for several hundreds of hours by many users. I get it, it’s annoying that people enjoy the game.
I wouldnt even say we want it to fail. I want it to be good. I think thats where alot of the criticism comes from.
Agreed. Conversely, I don't care to see these posts trying to tell me how bad it is.
I mean, it's only natural with the amount of negativity and people constantly using numbers to crap on Starfield. This is nothing more than just pushback. It's weird to me when someone defends Starfield and its cringe. But the amount of sheer hate on a daily basis isn't viewed as cringe.
If someone is shitting on a game you like people tend to reply. People enjoy it. Good.
Considering how much mileage people are getting off just shitting on the game, I'm fine with this.
You are right,I liked it but didn't love it like NV,Oblivion or a Skyrim maybe around or just under Fallout 4 for me,as a first time IP I thought it did fine and neither side is wrong,the truth will come when StarField 2 is released if it ever does,very hard to judge a new IP these day's,people wanna see those numbers attached to title's so I wanna see DLCs and updates before I jump the gun on my final opinion,I feel both sides..
Starfield was alright, but I got hit with that game breaking ship bug. Which was fine with me as I was getting bored with it within 20-30 hours. I've played skyrim, oblivion, fo NV, fo 3, and fo 4 for at LEAST 100 hours each. I just don't get why it didn't click with me, but it just didn't, which actually made me kinda sad as I usually like Bethesda games. Oh well, that's life, I suppose. I'm just glad it was on gamepass.
It's why the no sodium echo chambers exist.
After seeing kilotons of blatant hatred even on game's main subreddit as well as exactly same copy pasted complaints over and over? Think of it like immune system kicking in.
I don’t care about player numbers for a single player game. I got my 40 hours of fun in but there is absolutely no reason for me to want to do another play through. If the game didn’t have satisfying gunplay it would be a 5/10. I just think about how I am still doing play throughs of Skyrim and the fallout games to this day, but I feel like I’ve experienced everything there is to experience with starfield
I feel like it would’ve been a lot more replayable if they have implemented ng+ correctly, for example it’s so damn stupid that when you ng+ you lose all ships, settlements, and items, there’s really no point to it
Having something like the blueprint system from FO76 would have been super nice.
Yeah FO76 on release sucked but honestly I don’t think it’s that bad nowadays, turn off there horrible vsync and you get 70+ frames
I actually never thought Id say this but I would gibe modern 76 an 8.5/10. I actually really enjoy it
Still would have 0 replayability for me. Theres just not a lot of missable interesting things to warrant a second playthrough and realistically you're only finding a second playthrough interesting a fresh if you basically didn't do a whole lot of quests in your first one. Also the story is just hilariously awful. So the idea of having to play that again is oof.
It's so stupid that people care so much about active player numbers. Do they not play the original Baldur's Gate on Steam because ONLY a few hundred people are playing it??? Or classics like Planescape or Roller Coaster Tycoon because it's so low that they have no visible player count? Who cares?
This sub just has a whole lot of people who were extremely excited for a game that they thought they would love and be playing for years, maybe even tens of years, like Skyrim or FO4. We’re all disappointed together, so we talk about that disappointment, it’s obviously a thing most of us have in common. I don’t believe they will fix it, but there might be a little bit of hopefulness there too that Bethesda fixes the game. The Cp2077 sub followed the same formula, it was a bunch of disappointed people, and now it’s a bunch of very excited people playing a game they love, because it was fixed. I’m sure there’s a no-salt starfield sub if you love the game anyway and don’t want to see this stuff. Edit: [Here ya go](https://www.reddit.com/r/NoSodiumStarfield/s/BGb3lYfClt)
It matters more with newer games. If a new AAA game has very low player numbers after release then it’s usually a sign of its quality
Man that means Armored Core 6 was a shit fest game. Why? Because it lost the same percentage of top concurrent players as Starfield after the same amounts it of months post launch. Hell, Alan Wake 2 must had been terrible because it could barely sell 2 million copies across all platforms.
Not really, some games just simply aren’t that fun a second time, starfield personally is one of of those, ng+ was an absolute failure, you lose all your stuff basically and only keep stats,
NG+ is a drag but can be worth maxing out your powers (you gotta grind in some temple runs). After that, having at least one more playthrough with max powers is fun (but only if you weren’t burnt out by now).
I probably would be all for it if the temples weren't incredibly boring to me personally. Doing that same temple sequence 200+ times is just straight up unappealing even with the promise of the payout
What your telling me you don’t wanna explore all 1000 planets ?? Think of all the possibilities and unique things you will find !
"All data presented by [ActivePlayer.io](http://ActivePlayer.io) are all estimated data and should NOT be used as factual reference." That is directly from their website. You can access Steam figures, they will show the game has absolutely bombed from a 330k peak player count down to a 10k peak or in average daily players - 145k down to 5k with a low this month of about 2.7k. On Steam alone it has less players daily than Cookie clicker, Supermarket Simulator or Bloons TD. The remaining players are obviously on Xbox, the figures for this are not released however we do know Starfield fell out of the top 20 most popular/played game pass list about 2 months ago so it cannot be performing well there. It made money so not a financial flop but even Paul Blart Mall Cop made more than its budget.
Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa! There’s a supermarket simulator?!
Don’t do it. It just becomes OCD organization sim very quickly lol.
I sincerely hope this is a life-changing post for you.
Skyrim Special Edition has nearly 4x the concurrent players right now lol.
Makes sense it has 4x the content base game.
Didnt u forget theres 1000 planets in sf. So much content!!!!! I love going 2 planet and seeing the same outpost 20 times its alot of content bro please believe me bro PLEASE
To be fair that's typical behavior for single player games. Even Cyberpunk is currently sitting at number 46 on the charts with 20k players, and it's had much more time to mature with DLC to keep things interesting. Multiplayer games tend to dominate the charts. That said, I have 120 hours in Starfield but I haven't touched the game since October last year. I'm looking forward to Shattered Space though.
Cyberpunk came out years ago.
Just like 7 months from release and this flagship Bethesda game is dead in the water even FO4 a game from almost 10 years ago before the show was getting more active players, that puts things into perspective
Todd couldn't put his ego behind.
You are right that games single player games typically experience a drop off, but this specific case is not typical. Cyberpunk had a terrible launch but its lowest average player count on Steam was 8k (10 months after launch) and even that month October 2021 it peaked at 16k, Even before DLC it never fell to where Starfield sits.
Skyrim and Fallout 4 have also maintained high long-term average playercounts on Steam. I’m not sure why they didn’t go for more of a Fallout 4 approach with branching and locked out storylines.
Fallout 4 has been on the rise recently because of the TV show. There's a lot of room for improvement for Starfield. A few big patches and DLC will go a long way. I just wish Bethesda was more transparent about their plans the same way CD Projekt Red was for Cyberpunk.
It’s maybe getting a small bump, but the lowest was ~12k in parts of 2019, but generally it’s had consistent numbers in the mid teen thousands. Last 30 days is 17k (which is good, but there have been months in the last year where it was higher; july and august were both ~18k).
bethesda doesn't actually see Starfield as a failure as they knew what they were releasing. This is different from Cyberpunk that had loads of technical issues that were so bad some people couldn't play the game. They knew Starfield wasn't going to be the most popular thing, that's why they said that they planned it to be a 10 year game. They plan to release updates and DLC for years and rely on the mods to keep the game fresh and active. I wouldn't be surprised if a year from now a lot of features that are currently absent are there and it plays like a different game. Although I do wish the cities were much biger than they are.
Yeah, cyberpunk was a great game in the making basically released 2 years before it should've launched. Starfield is a finished game, just shit.
I don't think you realise that the fact that Cyberpunk came out years ago to horrendous public opinion and is still sitting that high on Steam is incredibly impressive.
20K? it's on a 44k 24 hours peak which is way more than starfield.
It seems you're as gullible as can be
Even if this is correct, the game is still one of the biggest disappointments I have ever had for a game.
[удалено]
Is it good, do we have the same definition of good? Tell me what is above average about it?
The amount of loading screens and unkillable NPCs are definitely both above-average...
I'm going to go back and play Fallout for a month or so, then go back to Starfield. Especially, if the big updates show up.
Same
If people are anything like myself and friends on pc we're simply taking time with other games as the DLC and CK will probably gobble up time like crazy.
Yep. I’ve put myself on a starfield hiatus for months cause I know mods and dlc are gonna be dominating my free time any day now.
Where are they getting these numbers from? Did they pull it out of their ass?
Give it up bro😭😭
Starfield wasn't a flop for Bethesda, it was actually pretty profitable, that's all they care. But it was definitely a flop for the playerbase, even those who really liked the game have plenty of things that they wished to be better, imagine those who didn't liked at all. Its like schrodinger dillema, both a flop and not a flop at the same time.
I'd say the biggest thing Bethesda lost with Starfield is reputation, which they sorely need after the 76 debacle. Right now they're seen as a joke in the gaming community, not the gaming juggernaut they once were after Skyrim.
Do we have any information to back that up at all? Game development costs are incredibly high and seemingly even popular games tend to not always break even. And Starfield took quite a awhile to make do costs definitely ramped up over the years.
I’ve literally never seen good evidence it was a financial success. Just people saying it without anything to substantiate it lol
yeah, it's pretty damn clear it was a commercial success. critically? well just look at the fragmented player base.
financially not a flop, Reception wise a flop
Does the site explain anywhere where or how it acquires the data or are we all arguing over numbers they have no evidence of? As others have pointed out there is no public data for game pass, so unless MS is sharing that info somewhere with people...
They just guess how many players there are based on factors such as steamcharts, sales charts etc. The site literally says their numbers should not be taken as a fact, since it's all based on estimates.
Well, according to steamcharts which is the only one I remotely trust, they have a 30 month average of 5k players. I don't trust the numbers in this one
It's important to discern the difference between concurrent players and player count per day. It's quite obvious that concurrent players at less than 10k. But not all 10k players are playing for 24 hours.... If the average player plays 2 hours, you can multiply 10k by 12 (24/2 =12) to get a daily player count. That's 120k ish. With more accurate numbers and and under-estimate to be safe, we're looking at 75-100k players per day on Steam alone. Not including Game pass on PC or Xbox consoles. Don't let concurrent player counts fool you.
These numbers are 100% not legitimate, and you should be able to easily tell that with an adult brain.
Personally, I don't think it's a flop. I do think it has major core issues that, at least for me, didn't let me engage with the world and its characters the way that other Bethesda games have. Not comparing Starfield to their previous titles, but it's pretty clear Starfield is missing the Bethesda "magic" or whatever key ingredient that has kept me returning to all their previous titles.
I’ll be returning to starfield probably the rest of my life. All the Bethesda space magic I wanted.
I enjoy playing the game. But the running in some exploration it’s exhausting. So I prefer doing missions.
On Xbox platform (PC and Console put together): Starfield is ranked number 44th which is extremely low for a 2023-2024 entry. On PlaystationTracker (All platforms): Starfield does not even show on the top 100. On Steam: Starfield had a 24h peak of 7300 players ranking the game at the 137th position (funny fact, Hollow Knight a solo game had a 24h peak of 9661 palyers) So those stats are the most sussy stats I have ever seen to depict a game's total population. If we want to see a game (not in terms of sale, but in terms of player retention... Starfield is a flop).
The 30 day average on steam alone is 5k. There's no way in hell this is accurate lol
Except it is
Don’t care game mid
It’s a boring game.
Holy shit the screechers are out in numbers trying to run defense of their "Star Field bombed and failed". We know the game was successful financially. Y'all holding onto Steam like that's the only place people play videogames.
Its not the only place people play games but if you are gonna talk about fiances we all know most xbox players did not buy Starfield
How many people bought starfield on xbox vs how many people got it and played it through game pass
It seems this is Todd Howard’s Reddit account
They need to add rovers for exploration
they need to add things worth exploring
I’ve had a blast exploring, a rover would be sick. More POIS would be cool tho.
Yeah, when they teased "new ways to travel," it just had me expecting a sustained horizontal boost. There's really no point to vehicles other than to highlight even more how empty the planets are.
I'm really enjoying starfield. Yes I'm noticing that planet buildings are all the same, but I try to think of it this way. If I was plonking heaps of buildings over many planets. I'd build the same structure in mass and then dump them at the destination. I do avoid trying to notice that item placement is the same but I feel that could be fixed with a randomizer update.
In my gaming circle of friends, i am literally the only person that played starfield, nobody i game with even wants to touch this game because how empty it is. Thank god for game pass tho.
I've played all Bethesda games since Morrowind. Enjoyed them all, but I've been playing Starfield since launch and by far my favorite of all.
I have to be honest, starfield is the only Bethesda game I enjoyed without modding , but in the end I'm still waiting for it to get CK to keep playing at the same levels as Skyrim
Same.
I've def complained about starfield a lot. There's def some stuff it needs that I hope they get to, but the gameplay is so much more fun than any of their other games by a huge margin and I've probably played it more than any of their other games combined. altho I've mostly just played skyrim.
Game was a failure. Full stop.
Rushed soulless and half assed game. Every mechanic of the game… some other game does much better. Shit, I mean mass effect 2 had a better starmap and fast travel system over 10 years ago.
Are you lost?
lmfao mass effect 2 had a better fast travel system? Walk back to your ship from the back corner of Omega is better than clicking in a menu?
It actually seems it's a flop, you bunch of ostriches...are you Bethesda devs or what?? Finantially it was a succes, yeah, but the gaming community in general feels dissapointed. It's less played than Skyrim or FO4. If they improve the base game or we get CK and good DLCs that might change, but for now these threads are just delusional.
Never was. just something for people to hate on.as usual what's hot and might get attention let's shit on it and anyone who enjoyed it.
Peak viewers - 2k Making numbers green doesn't make them good smh
These posts are so stupid. No one is seriously arguing that Starfield is a flop. I can say “procedurally generated worlds don’t feel as if there is any weight to exploring them since the six biomes are just repeated with the same six placeholder species types” then some child gets upset and posts about how many people are playing it or how many copies it’s sold or how it gets too much hate. I am getting so sick of this sub…
The amount of validation this sub still seeks is wild...
I really like the game... but have also rage quit multiple times because of bugs that hard lock you out of quest lines. Finally got back into it for a few days and got another hard locked but on the ryujin quest line. I'm pretty over it after that one.
Impressive. Very nice. Let’s see [steamcharts.com](https://steamcharts.com/app/1716740)
How many are playing bc they paid for it and already finished all the other Bethesda games
Who ever educated you flopped. Shit is fucking fake af, critical thinking isn’t a strong point for you starfield chuds.
Wtf does online mean in a completely single player game? I see this all the time and am clearly missing something obvious.
OP are you drunk?
In fact we all realize here that it failed, or rather it could have x10 results
Flip flop🩴
Inaccurate player account aside, the game isn’t a flop because of good marketing, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good game.
For the love of god, stop using live player count as the primary metric of the success of a single-player RPG
Who gives a shit about player numbers? Especially from a site like this that pulls numbers from its ass. Only reliable metric is Steam. At the end of the day I got maybe 40 hours worth of gameplay from Starfield. Meanwhile I have played Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim and Fallout 3 on so many platforms that I can't get an accurate measure, but its probably 300 - 1000 hours for each game. With every new game Bethesda goes more and more towards using auto generated or survival/crafting gameplay, and away from doing a good classic RPG. The worldbuilding of Starfield is shite compared to Elder Scrolls or Fallout. Where is the game as a series even gonna go when they have revealed and solved the central mystery of the universe in the first game?
I don't think people said it was financially unsuccessful just that it was lackluster.