It has been an interesting weekend for Xbox and Starfield. Runaway release Palworld suddenly appeared and took the markets by storm, first gobbling up some 1 million players on Steam roughly 8 hours after its release last Friday, January 19.
It has reportedly amassed 8 million players in the past few days. Along the way, it has surpassed Starfield’s peak concurrent number of players more than four times as it, at some point, saw roughly 1.2 million players on its servers simultaneously.
Now, it appears that Palworld is also taking over Xbox Game Pass. According to X user Boss Shawn, Palworld is already #1 in Game Pass, translating to roughly 1 million concurrent users on this platform alone.
As you can see in this infographic, Palworld has already overtaken AAA games like Resident Evil 2, Far Cry 6, and even Minecraft.
The question to ask, however, is this - has it edged Starfield out of the story? Not yet, because the Game Pass screenshot shows that our space exploration game is still hanging on at No. 9.
As Paul Tassi indicated, Starfield may yet be able to bounce back with much-needed patches, which Bethesda said will be coming every six weeks starting in February. The first update is currently undergoing beta testing on Steam Beta, and previews are showing some vital improvements. Of course, we’d only find out more once the final product rolls out in two more weeks.
Tassi also indicated that the Shattered Space DLC may be crucial to resuscitating Starfield after several months of consistently plummeting Steam scores and player count. However, no data is currently available for Starfield’s first-ever DLC.
Is Starfield down for the count? We don’t think so, but how about you? What do you think?