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

rockpapershotgun.com:

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