Starfield blasts past Skyrim's peak player count on Steam, but it's still well behind Fallout 4

pcgamer.com:

As expected, Bethesda's sci-fi RPG epic Starfield saw a major player spike on Steam over the first weekend since its full release on September 6, surpassing more than 330,000 concurrent players according to SteamDB. That's good enough to put it well past Skyrim, which broke more than 287,000 when it launched back in 2011, but still well back from Bethesda's number-one game, Fallout 4, which had nearly 473,000 concurrents in 2015.

It's a big number by any measure, and of course there are a lot of caveats attached. For one thing, it's just one slice of a pie that also includes the Microsoft Store edition of the game and Xbox Series X/S consoles: Xbox boss Phil Spencer said last week that Starfield had surpassed one million concurrent users across all platforms. And that figure includes not just people who purchased the game, but also Game Pass owners who were curious enough to give it a rip. Game Pass didn't even exist when Skyrim and Fallout 4 were new.

It's also interesting to consider the overall size of the Steam user base when comparing figures. In the distant days of 2011 when Skyrim was out there setting amazing new concurrent player records, there were roughly 40 million user accounts on Steam; these days Steam has nearly that many people using it all at the same time. The number of games Steam users have to choose from has also vastly increased, from roughly 1,800 in 2011 to more than 150,000 now.

Clouding the picture even further (because if there's one thing I learned from high school math, which I failed, it's that numbers are hard), Bethesda described Starfield as «the biggest Bethesda game launch of all time» on September 7, the day after full release and well before the concurrent player count on Steam hit