u/taosecurity

I've been tracking the top most downloaded games on Nexus Mods since July 2025. I predicted Starfield would pass Fallout 3 in October, and it's happened.

Who is next? According to my calculations, at present rates Starfield will pass The Witcher 3 no later than January 2027, when Starfield reaches 226.95 mil and TW3 has 223.07 mil. That tells me it will likely happen in late December 2026, really.

I don't see any movement beyond that point, or at least I haven't projected it far enough. Oblivion has 341.2 mil downloads right now, and that will continue to grow at a strong pace.

In case you wonder why I track this, I see it as a proxy for user interest in the game. Mod count is a proxy for modder interest in the game, which is not as important for me at this time.

Enjoy your Starfield mods! Here's hoping this makes it into the "gaming press" and it's not spun into another "Starfield is dead" story. 🤣

Their post highlights these milestones over the last three years.

I got the leaked DLSS 5 working on my 4070 Ti Super. It's not perfect though -- it's "flickering" between the old and new version, which is good for these screen caps but not for playing.

I only consider this a test at this point and expect the final version to be much better. This is running through a Reshade add-on.

The first photo is DLSS 5 and the second is DLSS 4.5.

If you look really closely at the indicator in the lower left hand side, you can see the model weights for the DLSS 5 versions.

The Xbox CEO, Asha Sharma, solidified Starfield as one of the three core franchises for Bethesda Game Studios, in this post to X. The fact that SF “made the cut” and survived the “reset” shows that SF is key to the studio.

https://xcancel.com/asha\_shar/status/2078119482204270711#m

Bethesda just posted on X:

https://xcancel.com/BethesdaStudios/status/2078117386935214101#m

"STARFIELD CONTINUES

With over 17 million players logging almost a billion hours to date, Starfield remains an important part of our future.

As we enter Year 3, we'll continue expanding the Settled Systems with new stories, targeted gameplay improvements, and additional updates, while preparing for the launch of new Starborn content next year.

More than 40% of players already customize their experience through Creations, and we'll continue investing in creators and giving players new ways to make Starfield their own."

There's more in there for the other franchises, but this is a nice antidote to all the love this sub shows for SF. 😂

TrueAchievements posted their top 100 most played Xbox games for the first half of calendar year 2026. Starfield was number 46 (pic 2).

It's based on "analyzing our sample of over 3.1 million Xbox accounts (which includes accounts from beyond TrueAchievements' membership)."

https://www.trueachievements.com/news/most-played-xbox-games-2026

I was surprised to see what was before and after Starfield.

From https://ko-fi.com/post/After-500-Hours-of-Development-Alpha-0-1-is-Read-K4C221U6AY

YT examples: https://www.youtube.com/@Ramisotti

NOTE: This is NOT ME.

"Hey everyone,

I’ve just finished Alpha 0.1! After more than 500 hours of work, with many ups and downs along the way, version 0.1 is finally ready.

So, what’s next and when can you play it?

Right now, I’m still polishing the joining tool and the lobby creation system. I want the process to be as simple as possible. The foundation is already in place, and the entire server infrastructure has been built and tested. However, it still needs some final polishing before the public release.

If everything goes according to plan, I’m aiming to release the alpha on June 23rd or June 24th. I’ll make a post here with all the information, including where to download the alpha and how everything works.

Just to be clear: this is a co-op mod, not a multiplayer/MMO mod. The focus is on playing together, not on persistent worlds where everyone does their own thing. That could theoretically be possible in the future, but it is not the current goal.

There will be plenty of bugs. The purpose of this alpha is to find and eliminate crashes that’s the main focus right now. Once everything is stable, the project will move into beta. At that point, there will still be a lot of work left to polish everything as much as possible, and I’ll need your feedback and testing to make that happen.

I’m really excited to see how people react to it. But again, this is an alpha release that contains the core foundation you’ve already seen in the videos.

The next post will be the release announcement. I’m looking forward to finally putting this into your hands and letting you test it!"

https://torrentfreak.com/youtube-processed-2-5-billion-content-id-copyright-claims-in-2025/

“To protect rightsholders, YouTube regularly removes, disables, or demonetizes videos that contain allegedly infringing content.

For years, little was known about the scope of these copyright actions, but that changed in late 2021 when the streaming platform published its first-ever copyright transparency report.

This report and the subsequent updates have shown that roughly 99% of all copyright claims on YouTube are handled through the Content ID system. Since most claims are automated, without any human intervention, access to this powerful removal tool is restricted to a few thousand formally approved rightsholders.

2.5 Billion Claims

YouTube’s latest Transparency Report shows that the number of automated claims continues to rise. In 2025, the platform processed 2,502,941,368 Content ID claims, up 14% from 2.2 billion the year before.

Of the approved 7,626 rightsholders who currently have access to the system, 4,454 actively used it. These numbers are both slightly down from last year. YouTube doesn’t provide a specific reason, but notes that access can be revoked as part of regular evaluations.

“To keep the ecosystem safe, we regularly evaluate partners’ access to CID to ensure they demonstrate an ongoing need for scaled rights management. In some cases, these evaluations may result in removing a partner’s access to Content ID and matching them with a more appropriate copyright management tool,” the transparency report reads.

As clearly shown above, the number of rightsholders participating in the Content ID system pales in comparison to the 295,531 rightsholders who filed removal requests through the standard webform, or the 173,338 that used the automated Copyright Match Tool.

Nonetheless, Content ID’s 4,454 active rightsholders were responsible for 99.48% of all copyright actions on the video streaming platform. Compared to earlier years, the automated Content ID takedowns continues to increase, both relatively in percentages and in absolute numbers.

Millions of Disputed Claims

As with any takedown tool, uploaders and third-party rightsholders are not always in agreement. In fact, there are millions of Content ID disputes every year.
YouTube reports that of all Content ID claims, uploaders have disputed 12,840,608, or 0.51% of the total. That’s a relatively small percentage but still a rather large absolute number. For comparison, uploaders appealed 9.9% of all webform removals, which translates to little over 267,000 counter-notices.

In 2024, uploaders won 70% of disputes. In 2025 that figure dropped slightly to 67.42%. However, those who decided to challenge the rejection though YouTube’s process, won their appeal 75% of the time.

Not all disputes are resolved though YouTube’s internal Content ID process. If uploaders persist that their content was erroneously claimed, while rightsholders argue the opposite, YouTube will reinstate the video, at which point rightsholders have to take the matter to court.

In 2025, 10,698 claims reached this stage, but fewer than 1% of these resulted in a lawsuit, YouTube notes.

Outside the Content ID system, YouTube also flags abuse of its DMCA takedown webform as a problem. In 2025, more than 6% of all these removal requests were believed to be “a likely false assertion of copyright ownership” by YouTube’s review team.

“The attempted abuse rate through the webform was more than 10 times higher than the attempted abuse rate across all other copyright removal tools,” the transparency report notes.

A $12 Billion Revenue Machine

While YouTube’s Content ID can be a significant source of frustration for uploaders, it has become a substantial revenue stream for rightsholders. Instead of removing infringing content, rightsholders chose to monetize over 90% of all Content ID claims in 2025.

YouTube reports that cumulative ad revenue paid to rightsholders through Content ID has now exceeded $12 billion since the system launched. That figure includes data up to December 2024 and will likely be billions higher today.”

Starfield passed the 12,000 mod count on Nexus Mods 5 months ago.

https://www.reddit.com/r/starfieldmods/comments/1q7dt6e/starfield\_just\_passed\_the\_12000\_mod\_count\_on/

Starfield passed the 11,000 mod count on Nexus Mods on 19 August 2025.

https://www.reddit.com/r/NoSodiumStarfield/comments/1muo3zm/starfield\_just\_passed\_the\_11000\_mod\_count\_on/

Starfield passed the 10,000 mod count on Nexus Mods on 3 February 2025.

https://www.reddit.com/r/starfieldmods/comments/1ih20wk/nexus\_mods\_just\_broke\_the\_10000\_mods\_mark/

Starfield is still the 11th most modded game on Nexus Mods, behind Morrowind, which had 14.4k in my last post and has 15.2k now.

Starfield is the 11th most downloaded game on Nexus Mods at 176.3 mil, behind Fallout at 198.5 mil and The Witcher III at 202.5 mil. Starfield had 129.5 mil in my last post.

There are currently over 5,340 Creations as well. In my last post it was just over 4,660.

Thanks YT channel member TheArcaneGearsmith for telling me!