Angela B. Games 02.13.2024 22:Feb PM EST

Bethesda’s Starfield Has Seen a Significant 97.5% Decrease in Peak Players

2023 was a good year for video game releases. We saw Street Fighter 6, Resident Evil 4 Remake, Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, Spider-Man 2, and of course, Starfield. Despite the hype that it got during release, it seems like the majority of its player base has abandoned the game.

Starfield Losing Players

It's pretty normal for a game to see a drop in numbers months after its release. The Bethesda game was launched back in early September 2023, meaning that five months have already passed by. Still, you can account for late players and those who replay the game.

Despite all the publicity from the game as well as the hype from its players, its popularity has seen a massive decline. In Steam, particularly, the game went from having a 330,723 all-time peak from five months ago to the current 8,379 24-hour peak, as per SteamDB.

That's an unexpected turnout, especially since it was released by a popular video game studio, and was advertised as a massive open-world that could even be the next Skyrim. Clearly, Bethesda did not achieve that goal.

To contrast the statistics, another game that was released a month prior, Baldur's Gate 3, seems to still be doing well. With an all-time peak of 875,343, the turn-based video game still has up to 128,567 players in its recent 24-hour peak.

A lot of players who have experienced the game expressed why Starfield was not what they expected it to be. Before the release, a lot were excited about the fact that there were several planets that they could discover, making for an interesting exploration.

However, it turns out that there's not much you can do on many of the planets you can visit aside from the tailored ones. This just shows that a huge map isn't always the best approach for a game, not to mention the load times you have to go through because of it.

Countless players have complained that almost everything you do in Starfield leads to a load screen, including getting into a vehicle, exiting a vehicle, getting on an elevator, and so on. This kind of ruins the immersive factor that games strive to achieve.

Low Player Count Doesn't Mean It's a Failure

Even though Startfield has lost the majority of its player base, that doesn't necessarily mean that it hasn't achieved success. After all, it was the best-selling game in September 2023, beating Mortal Kombat 1 and Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty.

Hogwarts Legacy also saw this kind of drop in players. Its all-time peak was almost at 880,000 but saw a great decrease in the following six months. It even got the the point where there were only around 53,519 players in its 24-hour peak.

You can see that Starfield still has the worse case, but the point is that even with such numbers, Hogwarts Legacy became the best-selling game in 2023. It might have something to do with the fact that it was released in February, but it's still impressive that it beat developers like Rockstar Games and Activision.