Starfield becomes Bethesda’s biggest ever launch with 10 million players

Good news for all the prey animals out there: Starfield's latest dinky update will finally allow you to achieve a field of view roughly equivalent to your own. The 1.7.36 patch for Bethesda's spacefaring RPG doesn't make many changes—in fact, it makes barely any—but it does fulfil Bethesda's promise of introducing a proper FOV slider to the game instead of forcing you to go rummaging around in .ini files to change the setting.

First impressions can be everything, especially with video games. A botched launch can spell doom for even the most highly anticipated titles. But sometimes, against all odds, games with a terrible launch manage to rise from the ashes of a disastrous debut. On some very rare occasions, the developer teams behind certain games decide not just to sit and watch everything collapse before their eyes.

Starfield is definitely one of Bethesda's more controversial titles. Sure, it's currently boasting numbers bigger than Skyrim, but opinions on the game's quality are all over the place. There's no place where this is more evident than the game's Steam page, which is currently sat at a Mostly Positive rating after almost 90,000 user reviews. However, almost 25,000 of those are negative, meaning Starfield is now Bethesda's lowest-rated game on the platform, dropping slightly below previous record holder Fallout 76.

When it comes to the big AAA titles that companies have been potentially several years into making, they want nothing more than to hear that the games have done well sales-wise and are soaring into the history books in one form or another. Obviously, that doesn’t always happen, but it’s nice to think that it can with the title that you’re making. Bethesda took a big risk when they made Starfield because they were making a new IP for the first time in a long time and kept delaying the game so that it would be as good as possible at launch.

Bethesda's sci-fi RPG continues to soar.

Starfield has officially hit 10 million players, according to Bethesda.

Starfield has seen more than 10 million players since it came out on September 1 in paid early access form, Bethesda has announced. The impressive milestone means Starfield remains the biggest launch in Bethesda history after shooting past six million players on September 7.

Bethesda Game Studios has announced that Starfield has surpassed ten million players across all platforms, reinforcing its status as the biggest launch ever for the developer.

Starfield got off to a predictably stellar start upon its release earlier in the month, becoming Bethesda’s biggest launch ever with over 6 million players and seeing over 1 million concurrent players across all platforms on the day of its release. Unsurprisingly, the sci-fi RPG has continued to see similar success in the days since then.

Today, GamesIndustry.biz has reported GSD (Game Sales Data) showing that Starfield has become the biggest Xbox launch this generation in Europe, beating Forza Horizon 5 in this regard. It is also the fastest-selling game based on a new intellectual property released in 2023 thus far.

Starfield was comfortably No.1 across Europe during its launch week, GSD data shows.

Microsoft in July announced that it was relaunching the Xbox Live Gold, its online subscription service that allows players to play multiplayer games, as Xbox Game Pass Core. it will finally be launched today, and it not only gives players access to multiplayer features but also free games. For the unaware, Microsoft has another subscription service for the Xbox called Xbox Game Pass that features a vast library of games that players can play without having to purchase each one separately, along with day-one access to new games. Xbox's most popular subscription is Xbox Game Pass Ultimate which offers a catalog of more than 400 Xbox One, Xbox 360, and original Xbox games as well as access to day-one releases.