Three months after its launch, Starfield is no longer in Steam’s list of the 100 games with the highest daily player count.
As of Jan. 2, Bethesda’s massive space RPG has been pushed out of the list—a list it had consistently been on since its Sept. 6 release. The game’s reception has been rocky, nuanced, and prone to change at a moments notice. When the game first released, it was met with mixed but ultimately positive feedback. Today, Starfield is sporting a Mostly Negative rating on Steam’s recent reviews tracker. It’s difficult to say exactly why perception of the game seemed to change so drastically over the course of four months, but personally, I think we all were just in a little bit of denial and kept convincing ourselves there must be more content we just hadn’t seen yet. I know I was.
In both 2021 and 2022, Starfield received nominations from The Game Awards for Most Anticipated Game. Come 2023, it received only a single nomination after its release: Best RPG (Baldur’s Gate 3 won the award). One could initially think that the buildup and hype the game received doomed it to be a letdown, but looking at the some of the other games on Steam’s Top 100 Daily Players list discredits that idea.
Skyrim and Fallout 4 are both still on Steam’s list at places 55th and 73rd respectively. Both of those titles were just as hyped up as Starfield was, and in Skyrim’s case it’s still massively popular over a decade later. Fallout 4 is even widely considered to be the worst entry of the Fallout series, and even that game is still performing better than Starfield despite now being seven years old.
Starfield will receive huge amounts of continued developer support throughout 2024, and it’s been announced that we can expect to see things like city maps, new travel methods, and more. According to Bethesda, the game will receive updates about every six weeks. If things go as planned for the studio, it may not be too late to turn things around for the open world space romp in the next year.
There’s one more massive feature incoming that may boost Starfield back into Steam’s Top 100: the Creation Kit. Modding is an absolute cornerstone of Bethesda games, and Starfield‘s current lack of a Creation Kit means that, in layman’s terms, modders are severely limited compared to Elder Scrolls and Fallout games. Starfield will receive a Creation Kit in 2024, and the subsequent Pandora’s Box of mods that will be opened may just be the saving grace the game needs to earn its place at the same table as other Bethesda titles.
