In a nutshell: Starfield might not have gained the same universal acclaim from critics and players as Baldur's Gate 3, but that didn't stop the space-based RPG from attracting over 6 million players in two days. The statistic means that Starfield is officially Bethesda's biggest game launch of all time.

On September 6, CEO of Microsoft Gaming Phil Spencer used X, formerly Twitter, to announce that Starfield had exceeded 1 million concurrent players across all platforms. It wasn't long afterward when the official Starfield account confirmed that its count of over six million players made it Bethesda's biggest launch ever.

Starfield sits above Baldur's Gate 3 as the top seller on Steam right now, though SteamDB's figures show that Bethesda's game's all-time concurrent peak of 330,723 is less than half of the D&D title's 875,343. Larian Studios' release has just landed on PlayStation 5, while Starfield is also available on Game Pass and Xbox – there are some technical problems with the Xbox Series S to be ironed out before Baldur's Gate 3 releases on Microsoft's consoles.

The Starfield account didn't specify how many of those six million players bought the game outright, were playing it on Game Pass, or purchased the special edition for early access. It wasn't revealed how they were split across platforms, either. Microsoft has emphasized it wants to see Starfield engagement over its sales, hoping that people will continue to subscribe to Game Pass for the hundreds of hours that can be poured into exploring the universe. There's no doubt the service will have seen plenty of sign-ups by people who want to play Starfield without paying the full retail price, too.

Starfield for PC has a Metascore of 87 on Metacritic, though the user score from over 5,300 people is a less impressive 5.6. On Steam, meanwhile, the 77% of the 38,000+ people who rated it favorably have earned Starfield a Mostly Positive rating.

In related news, owners (there are some) of Intel Arc A770 graphics cards experiencing massive performance problems in Starfield were informed by Bethesda Support that the GPU does not meet the minimum requirements of an AMD Radeon RX 5700 or Nvidia GeForce 1070 Ti. That's somewhat surprising, given that our own testing with the latest drivers saw the card outperform the RTX 3060 (and the RTX 3060 Ti, in some cases) across many games. Intel has released another driver that fixes some, but not all, issues for Arc users playing Starfield.

Make sure to check out our full Starfield GPU Benchmark feature with 32 GPUs tested - FSR on and off - right here. We also have an optimization guide to get the best performance out of your card.