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| Ryuu96 said: Screw it I'll go on the 1m train, I wanted to say 900-999 but the hype is getting to me. |
So I looked into the stats before making my prediction. When Skyrim released in 2011 Steam's overall peak concurrent user number was around 3m, Skyrim's peak of 287k was about 1/10th of that. When Fallout 4 released in 2015, Steam's overall peak concurrent users were 13.5m, so Fallout 4's peak concurrent users of 472k were definitely a smaller percentage of the overall Steam userbase than Skyrim's 1/10th, but still about 1/27th of the overall Steam peak Concurrent Users at the time. Steam's overall peak concurrent user record as of 2023 is 28.2m I believe, so Steam's userbase has seemingly more than doubled since Fallout 4 released in 2015 to 472k peak concurrent users.
Taking those numbers into account, it seems like the baseline, assuming roughly equivalent critic and user reviews to Fallout 4 for Starfield, would be doubling Fallout 4's 472k to reach 944k peak concurrent users, since Steam's active userbase itself has a bit more than doubled since 2015. We could also use the same 1 in 27 users from Fallout 4's calculation above on the total peak concurrent Steam users of 28.2m in 2023 to reach 1.044m for Starfield. However, that is of course assuming that Starfield is only about as popular as Fallout 4, Fallout 4 was a rushed release with just 2.5 years of full development, that got lower critic and user scores than Skyrim as a result, which likely hurt it's playerbase a good bit on launch. If Starfield reviews better than Fallout 4 (which is hopefully possible considering how much longer it has been in development for and how much longer they have spent polishing it), it could potentially reach closer to Skyrim levels of popularity, pushing it's peak concurrent users on launch up into Lost Ark territory of 1.3m range or above possibly even.
There is one last factor to take into account though, Gamepass PC. Gamepass could potentially pull a decent number of potential Steam sales over to playing the game for cheap on Gamepass PC. Alot depends on rather or not Starfield is one of the Gamepass games that allows easy unofficial modding or one that doesn't allow it. If the Gamepass version is limited to the heavily curated in-game mod store, which doesn't allow many mods created for Bethesda games, many PC gamers that like to mod will surely stick with the Steam version so that they can use Nexus mods and such. At this point it is hard to tell just how many users Gamepass PC will pull from Steam.
Last edited by shikamaru317 - on 16 August 2023
