Starfield had a loud launch, and the new Bethesda Game Studios title showed a peak online of 330 thousand players. However, the project received "mixed" reviews and could not retain its audience for long. Over time, the peak online dropped and recently it has been at the level of 4 – 6 thousand users.
However, Starfield is also available on consoles. One enthusiast under the nickname GdSmth decided to estimate the game's real audience across all platforms. To do this, he analyzed modifications.
Under each mod in the Creations system, there is a "plays" counter — it can be tracked across all three platforms (PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox).
The author of the study immediately admitted that he does not know its meaning:
This could be the number of times the game has been launched with that particular mod enabled, or the number of save files loaded. Also, I won't try to estimate how many times on average a player launches the game or loads a save per day, but if you want, you can offer your estimate. Nevertheless, we can still track changes in this counter, so over the past week, I took readings at 7-day intervals to calculate the daily average for probably the most popular Starfield mod.
The researcher examined the Trackers Alliance mod and found an "average" daily number of players slightly over 448 thousand.
Then he recalled Bethesda Game Studios' July statement that "More than 40% of players are already customizing their game with Creations (mods)."
Given this, GdSmth believes that the following daily launches over one week can be calculated as follows:
- PC — 484,688
- PlayStation 5 — 254,912
- Xbox — 357,246
As a result, the average daily audience of Starfield is 1,096,846 players. This is significantly more than the peak Steam online of 4-6 thousand. However, discussion participants noted that the game often crashes — this "million" could include numerous save reloads.