Starfield – it’s rocketing up the Steam and Twitch charts (Picture: Microsoft)

The reviews may have been mixed, but Starfield is already proving very popular according to data from Steam and Twitch.

It comes as no surprise that Starfield is all anyone’s talking about at the moment. It’s easily one of the most anticipated games of the year and managed to reach the top of Steam’s sales charts even before the early access period began this morning.

At the time of writing, it’s maintained that spot and is also enjoying some strong player stats, which will only go up further once Starfield launches properly next week.

In less than 24 hours, it’s already the sixth most played game on Steam and it’s peaked with 234,502 concurrent players (as in how many people were playing it at once), which is impressive considering some people struggled to get it working.

Admittedly, these numbers aren’t quite as good as Bethesda’s last two role-playing games. Skyrim, the last Elder Scrolls game, peaked at 287,411 concurrent players when it launched in 2011. 2015’s Fallout 4 performed even better, peaking at 472,962 players.

However, it’s important to note that Starfield is only in early access, meaning not everyone is able to play it. It’ll be interesting to see if its peak player count can beat these older games once it’s available at normal price.

In fact, the early access may prove quite beneficial for Starfield and Bethesda, since it means people can stream unfiltered gameplay on Twitch and thus expose Starfield to more potential customers.

When it comes to Twitch numbers, Starfield is happily stomping both Skyrim and Fallout 4, which peaked at 197,907 concurrent viewers and 244,138 concurrent viewers, respectively, according to SteamDB.

Starfield, by comparison, peaked at 543,234 concurrent Twitch viewers, demonstrating that a lot of people are at least curious to see what the game is all about.

More: Trending

Analytics website SullyGnome reveals that it’s easily become the top trending game on the platform, with about 3,576,045 hours spent watching Starfield related streams. That’s more than double the hours spent watching the runner-up, Dota 2, in the past three days.

This also makes it one of the most watched games on Twitch over the last three days, just about breaking into the top 10. It still sits below longer-running games like Fortnite and Grand Theft Auto 5, but the fact that it managed to take 10th place in less than a day is impressive regardless.

It’s obviously too soon to tell how well Starfield will sell, but it seems things are starting positively overall, even if the reviews so far have proven less euphoric than Microsoft and Bethesda may have hoped.

Starfield launches for Xbox Series X/S and PC on September 6.

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The reviews may have been mixed, but Starfield is already proving very popular according to data from Steam and Twitch.