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

Starfield is back on top by a few hundred players, but for how long?

The number of people playingStarfieldon Steam has slipped under the concurrent player count for the 12-year-oldThe Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, just two months after Bethesda proclaimed the sci-fi exploration epic as their biggest game launch to date.

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 thespace gamehad 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 isalsoon 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 at least is the fact that the Special Edition isn’t its only version; there’s also its regular release andSkyrim VR. While neither of those is seeing anywhere near the same players - the regular Skyrim has seen around 3,000 at most in the last week, while only a couple hundred seem to be playing in virtual reality - they add an extra slither to its mudcrab cake.

After spending seven hours or so chasing Skyrim’s tail, Starfield has since climbed back above it on Steam at the time of writing and still has it beat when it comes to peak players in the last day. But with only a few hundred players separating the two, it might be that they continue to jostle for players’ attention in the days to come. For now, at least, it seems that theBethesda charm lost in the vastness of spacemight have lost a few players along with it, too.