Bethesda Game Studios’ latest action role-playing game, Starfield, has surpassed a player count of 2 million with just those who bought the Premium Edition.
According to user sampling data obtained by online player tracking site, PlayTracker, it is estimated that Starfield has far surpassed the 1 million player count milestone on both Steam and Xbox platforms with only those who bought the Premium Edition. It is further stated that sampling data comes in slowly, and tends to have a delay. The game’s full launch is tomorrow, on September 6, 2023, and these numbers are expected to see a major increase.
As per the site’s methodology, the core of PlayTracker insight is a data sampling methodology like the one used in political polls around the world. In simple terms, the site counts how many people in its sample group have a game and then extrapolate that onto the world to estimate total players. The details, however, are much more complex.
PlayTracker maintains two samples i.e. its cross-platform correlated database of users and a rolling sample of anonymous public profiles. However, neither of these data samples are truly random because users must opt into either registering for PlayTracker or simply setting their profile to public, therefore the samples are not statistically representative. In order to tackle this, the site uses machine learning.
Both samples are inputs into an algorithm that learns from publicly available data such as reviews, concurrent players, and most importantly confirmed player number data points, such as when a publisher boasts about sales numbers. By comparing tens of thousands of these reliable confirmed data points to the data in our samples, the algorithm develops its understanding of which users are overrepresented or underrepresented, and then adjusts its estimates accordingly.
Previously, it was reported that HDR functionality is broken in Starfield on both PC and Xbox consoles. Read about it here.
