Starfield overtakes Skyrim with concurrent Steam players

With the release of Phantom Liberty, thousands of players are flocking back to the game.

Everyone and their dog has played The Elder Scrolls 5Skyrim, but what about taking a journey through Bethesda’s back catalogue? Fanatical’s fantastic build-your-own Bethesda bundle lets you fight fantasy creatures in Morrowind, slaughter demons in Doom, kill Nazis in Wolfenstein: The New Order and much, much more.

, with more than 1,000 planets and 100 star systems, has a plethora of excellent quests, many of which are easy to miss as they are non-essential side quests. In spite of not being necessary for the completion of the game, many of 's side quests are among the greatest, most entertaining, and most immersive quests in the game. Perhaps the best element of many of these side quests, however, is the exceptional rewards they offer the player.

Starfield can be a rather gorgeous game at times. Peer too closely, however, and you’ll start to notice the cracks in the facade. Many of the game’s textures and effects don’t hold up to close inspection, while a lot of the faces have a rather plastic look to them – something you’ll likely become very aware of, given how close in proximity Bethesda NPCs like to stand while you’re chatting to them. Fortunately, legendary Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 mod creator ‘Halk Hogan’ is here to instantly improve your Starfield graphics.

During the E3 presentation in 2018, Bethesda took to the stage and teased an open-world RPG set in space and called it Starfield. It would be the first IP developed by Bethesda in over 25 years. After years of anticipation, the developer finally launched Starfield on September 6 exclusively for the Microsoft Xbox and Windows. Despite not even one month elapsing since it was launched, Starfield is already being lauded as the game of the year by many, with high critic scores and rave reviews from players.

Having already surpassed Skyrim and Fallout by becoming Bethesda’s biggest launch to date - with over six million players, according to the developer - Starfield has now smashed another of its predecessor’s records.

One of the biggest draws about Starfield is the number of planets you can explore. It’s not so much an open-world game as it is more of an open-galaxy title. With that, you might understandably want these giant balls of rock to look their best. That’s where the modding community comes into its own.

Starfield has managed to attract more concurrent players on Steam than Skyrim ever has.

Starfield hasn't even been out for a full week yet (well, if you're ignoring the premium edition's early access launch) and it has already managed to beat Skyrim's all-time player peak on Steam.

Starfield has now surpassed the Steam concurrency peak of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which registered 287K concurrent users when it launched twelve years ago, entering Steam's all-time Top 30. It is not the highest concurrency peak of a Bethesda Game Studios title on Steam; Fallout 4 reached a peak of 472K users when it launched eight years ago. However, it was a given that a meaningful portion of players would opt to access the game via the Microsoft Store and the Game Pass subscription service, as per Microsoft's policy.

Starfield has set a new record as the most successful game launch for Bethesda yet, overtaking the likes of Skyrim and Fallout with over six million players, according to the developer.

After only a week of availability, there are already hundreds of Starfield mods available to download over on NexusMods.