On Thursday evening, gamers who purchased the $100 Premium Edition or the $300 Constellation Edition of Starfield were able to start playing the sci-fi space-based RPG in early access. That included the PC version of the Premium Edition that was available on Valve’s Steam service.
Because the game hasn’t been “officially” released, Starfield is not showing up on Steam’s most-played list. However, the independent SteamDB site was able to get the data from Steam’s services, and it shows that Starfield has had as many as 234,502 players online at once for its first two days.
At the time of this writing, Starfield is the fifth most played game on Steam at the moment, again according to SteamDB. We expect that those concurrent player numbers to jump much higher on the evening of September 5, which is went players of the Standard $70 version of Starfield can begin playing.
The game is also at the top of Steam’s sales charts at the moment and has been in the top 100 list in terms of sales for the past 12 weeks.
While it was expected that Starfield would get a big launch on Steam, the key is whether or not it will keep a large number of players online sometime after September 5. Bethesda will likely be happy if the game retains the number of players that another single-player RPG has done recently.
We are of course talking about Baldur’s Gate 3, which launched a month ago and had over 800,000 concurrent players at its peak on Steam. Right now, the game continues to be popular on Valve’s service. It is not only the third best-selling game on Steam (behind Starfield and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive), but it is also the third most-played game on Steam right now.
While it has lost a lot of its concurrent player base since the launch, there are still well over 480,000 Baldur’s Gate 3 Steam players online at once. That would certainly be a good position for Starfield to be in a month after its launch.