Xbox boss Phil Spencer has announced that Starfield has now seen over 12 million players.
Speaking during the CCXP event in Brazil, Spencer described Bethesda’s space RPG as “a tremendous hit”, although failed to announce sales figures or the split of players between Game Pass subscribers and owners of the game itself.
“Starfield has now had over 12 million players since the launch of Starfield, and it still sits in our top 10 most-played games from our studios,” Spencer said. “So thank you everybody for all the support on Starfield, and making it a tremendous hit.”
Starfield launched on PC and Xbox Series X and S in September as a day-one Game Pass title. It became the biggest launch in Bethesda history after shooting past six million players during week one, then saw more than 10 million players less than three weeks after it came out.
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The news follows the emergence that Bethesda is responding to negative reviews of Starfield on Steam. Representatives of the Microsoft-owned company have been replying to negative reviews on Valve’s platform since early November amid Starfield’s ‘mixed’ user review rating of 68%.
On the community front, one Starfield player recently completed the game via New Game Plus over 30 times, and encountered a surprisingly cool interaction they hadn’t seen before.
Looking to the future, Spencer promised more content is coming to Starfield, and said it was the team’s goal to have people playing the game over a decade after its launch, just as people have played Bethesda’s own Skyrim 12 years after that monster hit came out.
“Skyrim is such an amazing hit from Bethesda Game Studios, and talking to Todd Howard and the team, really what they wanted to do as people who love space and space exploration, is give them that same opportunity [as Skyrim].
“So we’ve already announced that we’ve got our next expansion coming, Shattered Space. We’ve already told the community that they’ll get all the mod tools so they can go and create their own content in Starfield, which has been so important to Skyrim.
“So a ton of confidence that for many many years Starfield will be sitting very high in the gameplay [charts].”
IGN’s Starfield review returned a 7/10: “Starfield has a lot of forces working against it, but eventually the allure of its expansive roleplaying quests and respectable combat make its gravitational pull difficult to resist.”
IGN has a number of helpful Starfield guides, including best mods, best traits and backgrounds, and best ship build. We’ve also got a list of all Starfield Item IDs.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
