Starfield surpasses 12 million players as Phil Spencer says we’ll be playing for ‘many, many years’

Starfield has seen massive success since it launched just a few months ago. In October, Microsoft announced that the game had surpassed 11 million players, and now Phil Spencer has revealed that the title has over 12 million. Understandably, he’s very optimistic about the game’s future.

During a recent panel interview at CCXP in São Paulo, Brazil, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer revealed that Starfield has amassed a whopping 12 million players since its launch and stated that it “still sits in the top 10 most-played games” from the studio. Additionally, when asked by the interviewer and host Mari Palma on whether he believes Starfield will be as successful and long-running as Skyrim, he responded by saying that the team’s goal is to give people “who love space and space exploration that same opportunity,” that he has “a ton of confidence that for many, many years, Starfield will be sitting very high.” 

In the same interview, Spencer also reiterated the team’s goal of launching the upcoming Shattered Space expansion and releasing the previously announced mod tools, which players will be able to use “to create their own content in Starfield.”

Starfield’s full mod support tools will launch sometime in 2024, and according to Director of Bethesda Game Studios Todd Howard, players “will be able to do almost anything” with them, and the tools will even “let players make entire planets of their own” when they launch. Not much is currently known about the upcoming Shattered Space DLC other than that it will be a story expansion.

Starfield first launched into early access on Sep. 1 and achieved over 230,000 peak concurrent players on Steam during its early access period. It seems like the game is only getting more popular as time goes on, and with more content coming soon, it’s safe to say Starfield could stay on this trajectory for a long while. Starfield is available now for Xbox Series X|S and PC.