Starfield Breaks Skyrim's Steam Player Record, But 'You May Need To Upgrade Your PC For This Game,' Says Director

In its first weekend after the full launch, Bethesda's Starfield has surpassed The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim's all-time concurrent player record on Steam.

According to IGN, Starfield reached 27th place on Valve's storefront all-time list with a peak of 330,723 concurrent players, while Skyrim, which held the record for 12 years, is now in 31st place.

It fell short of Bethesda's previous release, Fallout 4, which sits in 16th place with 472,962 concurrent players.

Starfield's lower ranking is partly attributed to its availability on Microsoft Corp.'s MSFT Xbox Game Pass, where it reached over six million players and one million concurrent players on launch day.

This subscription service likely influenced player numbers on Steam, and it may prevent it from reaching the platform's top 10 games.

Despite this, overtaking Skyrim is a notable achievement for Starfield, and it also topped the UK boxed chart.

Moreover, in an interview with Bloomberg, Todd Howard, the director of Starfield, acknowledged some PC users have experienced performance issues with the game and suggested it may be time for them to upgrade their PCs.

"I asked our audience, ‘What would you ask Todd?’" Bloomberg anchor Ed Ludlow said. "Big question for many: ‘Why did you not optimize this game for PC?’"

"Uh, we did," Howard answered.

And added: "It’s running great. It is a next-gen PC game. We really do push the technology, so you may need to upgrade your PC for this game."

While some fans expressed annoyance at the lack of optimization and reported issues like loading screens and frame rate drops, Howard defended the game's performance and mentioned that fans are responding positively to its features.

Bethesda recommends specific PC hardware requirements for optimal performance in Starfield, including an AMD Ryzen 5 2600X or Intel Core i7-6800K processor, an AMD Radeon RX 5700 or NVIDIA GeForce 1070 Ti graphics card, and 16 GB of RAM.

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Photo: Bethesda via Steam.