'Starfield' gathers 1 million concurrent players on launch day

Surprise, surprise: Starfield is a hit.

One of the most hyped games of the year from one of the most celebrated studios in gaming reached its official launch day (after a brief early access period for some players) on Wednesday. Predictably, Starfield seems like a big hit. Xbox head honcho Phil Spencer posted a tweet late Wednesday night claiming that more than 1 million people were playing Starfield across all platforms (Xbox, PC, Xbox game streaming) that day.

That's obviously a whole lot of folks, and according to GamesRadar+, a little more than 269,000 of them were on Steam, meaning more than 700,000 of them were on Xbox, game streaming, or Microsoft's official Game Pass client for PC. Speaking of Game Pass, that particular subscription service is probably why Starfield did so well on opening day.

All it takes is $17/mo to be able to play first-party Xbox games on launch day, so it stands to reason that a lot of those concurrent players didn't even buy the game.

In other words, Microsoft's strategy of looping customers into an affordable subscription service for games seems to have worked this time. Lots of folks who may not have been inclined to drop $60 on Starfield got to try it anyway, and who knows? Maybe some of them liked it!

Here's hoping all of those people made good choices during character creation and got the best spacesuit in the game right away.