Xbox head Phil Spencer says Starfield hit over 1 million concurrent players Wednesday

Starfield officially launched on Tuesday evening, after a five-day period of early access for people who pre-ordered the more expensive Premium and Constellation editions. Now Microsoft is touting the number of gamers who have played the sci-fi RPG from developer Bethesda Game Studios.

In an X (formerly Twitter) post late on Wednesday night, Microsoft's Xbox head Phil Spencer stated, "Starfield exceeded 1 million concurrent players across all platforms today."

While we don't have specific numbers for Xbox players, Xbox Cloud Gaming players or PC players from the Microsoft Store, we do have info on the concurrent players for the PC version of Starfield on Valve's Steam service.

Valve's Steam player stats currently show Starfield as the fifth-highest game (at the time of writing) in terms of concurrent players. The game reached a personal concurrent player peak of 269,177 on Wednesday. However, those numbers are still behind those of another recent single-player RPG, Larian's Baldur's Gate 3. It's currently in third place, with a Wednesday top player peak of 373,504.

It's more than possible that we could see a higher Steam concurrent player count for Starfield this weekend, as more people will likely find the time to play the game without having to worry about going to work. The game is still the number one best-selling title on Steam at the moment, which means many people have likely just decided to go ahead and buy Starfield rather than preorder it ahead of time.

Spencer's X post also has a graphic that shows the many positive reviews Starfield has received from gaming media outlets. It currently has an 86 score on Metacritic. However, many major game media outlets, like IGN, GameSpot, and PC Gamer, have not been quite as enthusiastic as others have been.