Starfield’s player count slips below Skyrim on Steam, just two months after Bethesda’s ‘biggest launch ever’

13.11.2023 - 18:25 / rockpapershotgun.com / Phil Spencer / Bethesda Softworks

The number of people playing Starfield on Steam has slipped under the concurrent player count for the 12-year-old Skyrim, just two months after Bethesda proclaimed the sci-fi exploration epic as their biggest game launch to date.

Earlier today, Monday November 13th, Skyrim’s Special Edition edged above Starfield by a few hundred players, with 12,705 people venturing back into Tamriel while 12,334 were jetting between probably fairly barren planets in the galaxy, according to data tracking site SteamDB.

Skyrim’s recent overtaking of Starfield followed a week where the two games grew closer and closer in the rankings, with fewer than 200 people separating their respective player counts. Starfield managed to open up a slightly bigger gap over the weekend, before Skyrim eked out the top spot at the beginning of this week.

Alright, it’s time to add a bunch of asterisks to these particular numbers. Of course, Starfield isn’t just available on Steam - notably, it’s also available via PC Game Pass, with Xbox honcho Phil Spencer saying in early September that the space game had seen over a million players on Game Pass just a few days after its release. Comparatively, there were around 300,000 concurrent Steam players at the same time. In other words, it’s likely that Starfield still has plenty more total players than those only on Steam - Bethesda itself claimed that six million people had played it a day after its full release, making it “the biggest Bethesda game launch of all time”.

However, Skyrim’s Special Edition is also on PC Game Pass, so it could be that the numbers are seeing a similar battle over there - we don’t actually know, because we can’t see those Game Pass stats. Giving Skyrim a potential edge on Steam at least is the fact that the Special Edition isn’t its only version; there’s also its regular release and Skyrim VR. While neither of those is seeing anywhere near the same players - the regular Skyrim has seen around 3,000 at most in the last week, while only a couple hundred seem to be playing in virtual reality - they add an extra slither to its mudcrab cake.

What is interesting from all this is how quickly it appears that Starfield has tailed down from its impressive launch, dropping down just two months after it released; by way of comparison, Skyrim’s original release had fewer players at launch in 2011, peaking at around 290,000, but didn’t fall below 20,000 players until almost seven years later in May 2018. (Two months after release, Skyrim was still on somewhere around 90,000 concurrent players on Steam.)

After spending seven hours or so chasing Skyrim’s tail, Starfield has since climbed back above it on Steam at the time of writing and still has it beat when it comes