Starfield May Have Had As Many As 2 Million Players In Early Access

gameranx.com:

Starfield has officially launched, so everyone who bought the game full price without a special edition, and everyone who has Game Pass, can now freely install and play the game on Xbox Series X|S and PC. But are you wondering how many people played Starfield through Early Access?

PlayTracker, a platform that collects various game data, estimates that Steam reached more than 1 million players. Incredibly enough, Xbox, including Xbox Series X|S, and gamers playing Xbox games on their PC, also reached more than 1 million players.

In PlayTracker’s words:

“Based on our user sampling data so far, PlayTracker estimates #Starfield has far surpassed the 1M player milestone on both Steam and XBOX with just the Premium Edition buyers.

Sampling data comes in slowly, with a delay. Full launch is tomorrow, we’ll be watching the fireworks.”

We should add a proviso here on how PlayTracker makes its estimates. To quote them from their website:

“Distilled down to its basics: we count how many people in our sample have a game and then extrapolate that onto the world to estimate total players.”

PlayTracker further explains that they have a smaller sample of verified users sharing data, and they use machine learning to make some of their estimates from that data.

So, yes, there is a possibility that PlayTracker’s estimates could be off the mark. That possibility of error can be mathematically calculated as well. We don’t know if PlayTracker was able to verify 1 million players for either platform for now.

But we should still acknowledge the relevance of this estimate. It does mean that there is a possibility that Starfield really did reach these landmark numbers. That they came to this estimate itself hints at a very large player base that