Bethesda's ambitious sci-fi RPG Starfield has been played by more than 12 million people since its release.

That's according to Xbox boss Phil Spencer – as spotted by Twitter user IdleSloth84_ – who spoke at São Paulo's 2023 Comic Con Experience and thanked players for picking up the game. The exec also added that Starfield is one of Microsoft's Top Ten most-played games.

"Starfield has been awesome," Spencer said. "One of the special things about my job is I get to play games very early in the development. In fact I was playing Starfield about this time last
year and the game came out at the beginning of September of this year. I could tell when I was playing and the fact that I couldn't stop playing that this was probably going to be a pretty special game so you never know when something is going to be a hit but it was nice to see how successful it's been.

"In fact, Starfield has now had over 12 million players since the launch of Starfield, and it still sits in our top 10 most played games from our studios, so thank you, everybody, for all the support on Starfield and making it a tremendous hit."

Starfield is available to both regular consumers and Game Pass subscribers, meaning that this doesn't mean 12 million sales.