Bethesda’s space RPG, published by Microsoft, has lost a large part of its players on Steam, who are mainly expecting new content from the studio.
It was one of the most anticipated games of last year: Starfield has welcomed more than 13 million players since its release and generated the most subscriptions to Microsoft’s Game Pass for a launch.
But then, Bethesda’s space RPG was not received as positively as expected, with “Average” ratings still today on Steam. Despite an increasingly sustained update rate, we are entitled to wonder how Starfield will recover.
Starfield loses 97% of its players on Steam
It is the PCGamesN site which relays the information: Starfield has lost almost 97% of its players on Steam since its launch 5 months ago. While the game brought together 330,000 players at its launch, it has now fallen below 10,000 simultaneously in February.
For comparison, the game is now less popular than Skyrim on Steam (peak at 25,000 players), Fallout 4 (18,000 players) and barely surpasses the very unloved Fallout 76 and its peak at 8000 players.
Obviously, the game is also widely played through Microsoft’s Game Pass subscription and many players have purchased it on Xbox consoles, but numbers like these provide insight into its declining popularity on one platform.
Bethesda’s ambitions to get back on track
But Starfield is a single-player game, an RPG that hasn’t had several years to enrich its content and fix its bugs. We know that you have to be patient before playing a Bethesda game in the best conditions and the studio always has great ambitions.
A huge update on January 30 brought more than 100 fixes, but also numerous improvements to the game, including significantly improved graphics. A beta version patch has just brought support for AMD’s FSR 3 as well as Intel’s XeSS after that of Nvidia’s DLSS.
Other updates are expected during the year with the addition of maps for the largest cities, highly anticipated new ways of traveling and even new customization options for ships.
And if certain rumors suggest an arrival of Starfield on PS5, these should be taken with a grain of salt while awaiting official announcements from Microsoft in the coming days. This could, however, make the game available to a huge additional gaming community.
However, Starfield is missing one thing to hope for a return to favor in No Man’s Sky: content. The game’s first expansion, Shattered Space, is due this year and is expected to bring a new storyline, new play areas as well as a plethora of new items and ships. But will this be enough for the game to return to the forefront? Nothing is less sure.