Skyrim has outperformed Starfield throughout 2024

Starfield launched just over six months ago, yet more people are now playing Skyrim than Starfield. Bethesda’s space RPG managed to hit an all-time peak of 330,723 players on Steam on September 10, 2023, significantly trumping Skyrim’s 287,411 player all-time peak in November 2011. 

Having had a promising start, Starfield’s player count has dwindled substantially from over 330,000 players at launch to just 7000 in the last 24 hours. Despite numerous Starfield updates, patches, and Starfield mods, Starfield’s Steam player count trend doesn’t appear to be improving. Skyrim, however, seems to be growing in popularity.

Despite launching in 2011, and being remastered in 2016, the Skyrim Special Edition consistently outperformed Starfield on Steam throughout the start of 2024. Skyrim’s average player count has successfully reached more than 30,000 players every weekend since January. Starfield, by comparison, has dropped from less than 20,000 players to just 10,000, and the trend isn’t improving. 

Sadly, Starfield doesn’t appear to be performing as well as Bethesda may have hoped. However, we believe that the upcoming Starfield DLC and first story expansion – Shattered Space – could rescue this trend, at least for a short while. Long-term success for Starfield will likely hinge on massive improvements and overhauls akin to the treatment developer Hello Games gave to No Man’s Sky. Some of Starfield’s teething issues can be rectified by the dedicated modding community, especially once official mod support releases later this year.

Hopefully, Starfield will get the love it deserves and prove to players why it’s worth playing, but it will have to beat Skyrim’s popularity first. 

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