Starfield Surpasses Skyrim’s Steam Concurrency Peak; Mod Tools Coming in 2024

wccftech.com:

Starfield has now surpassed the Steam concurrency peak of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which registered 287K concurrent users when it launched twelve years ago, entering Steam's all-time Top 30. It is not the highest concurrency peak of a Bethesda Game Studios title on Steam; Fallout 4 reached a peak of 472K users when it launched eight years ago. However, it was a given that a meaningful portion of players would opt to access the game via the Microsoft Store and the Game Pass subscription service, as per Microsoft's policy.

We'll probably never know exactly how many full-price units have been sold since Microsoft stopped disclosing those a long time ago. Still, as announced on Thursday by Bethesda, the sci-fi roleplaying game is already the studio's biggest launch with over six million players across all platforms.

Bethesda also plans to keep gamers glued to Starfield for a long time between official DLCs (Shattered Space being the first story expansion), free updates, and mods. On that note, in an interview published a couple of days ago by Japanese website Famitsu, Game Director Todd Howard revealed that the official Starfield modding tools will be released sometime in 2024. Here's the relevant quote (translated through Google):

With mods, you will be able to do almost anything, just like in previous works. Mod support will be available next year, but we love it too, so we'll do it in a big way.

This isn't surprising, either, as there is usually around three months of waiting from a Bethesda Game Studios launch and the public modding tools release. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim launched on November 11, 2011, and the mod tools were shared with the community on February 7, 2012, alongside the High Resolution Texture Pack.