Starfield Climbs To 12 Million Players, Phil Spencer Believes It Can Have Skyrim-Like Life

Xbox is celebrating a new milestone for Starfield after Phil Spencer announced it’s now seen over 12 million total players in the three months since launch. The Xbox head also talked about the future of the space exploration epic, comparing Bethesda’s ambitions for the game to Skyrim’s extended life cycle.

Speaking at CCXP in Brazil, as picked up by IGN, Spencer celebrated Starfield’s success since launch. “Starfield has now had over 12 million players since the launch of Starfield, and it still sits in our top 10 most-played games from our studios,” he said.

When asked if Spencer could see Starfield having a similar lifespan to Skyrim, the Bethesda RPG that is still popular with fans 12 years after its release, he said “that’s our goal.” Spencer added that Todd Howard and the team at Bethesda hope that Starfield can be a similar experience to Skyrim for “people who love space and space exploration.”

“So we’ve already announced that we’ve got our next expansion coming, Shattered Space, we’ve already told the community that they’ll get all the mod tools so they can go create their own content in Starfield, which has been so important for Skyrim,” Spencer said. “So a ton of confidence that for many many years Starfield will be sitting high in the gameplay.”

By all accounts Starfield has had a strong launch, counting 1 million concurrent players on launch day, and celebrating over 6 million players within a week of launch. It’s hard to compare to Bethesda’s other games, however, as Starfield also launched on Game Pass, and Xbox hasn’t revealed how many players bought the game versus playing it as part of their subscription–though Microsoft did attribute a spike in Game Pass subscriptions to Starfield’s launch.

Starfield also hasn’t seen the same acclaim from critics or fans as Bethesda’s earlier titles, becoming the studio’s lowest rated game on Steam, with just 68% positive reviews at the time of writing. Concurrent player numbers on Steam have also dropped off dramatically since launch, now regularly sitting below Skyrim in the charts–though it’s still worth keeping in mind Steam is only a fraction of the game’s player base with Starfield also available on Xbox and Game Pass.