Starfield
Bethesda
No, with all the near-perfect games out in 2023, I do not believe that Starfield has a shot at GOTY. And at this point, I’m doubting that it’s going to make most award show/publication top 5-6 lists. However, like Hogwarts Legacy before it, the performance of this game is really quite stunning, and continues to be a full two months after launch.
I was skeptical of Microsoft selling this as “Bethesda’s biggest launch ever” as with Starfield in Game Pass, that was not a huge shock. And of course, we’re not going to know exact sales given that Game Pass inclusion.
However, every time I circle back to see how Starfield is doing, I am deeply impressed. This is a single player game that doesn’t have PvP, co-op or even official mod support yet like Bethesda’s other games. It is also a game with what I would consider to be a somewhat hard ending, despite its New Game Plus loop. And yet here we are.
Two months later, Starfield remains the sixth most-played game on Xbox, behind only massive multiplayer games like Fortnite, Call of Duty, Roblox, Rainbow Six Siege, NBA 2K24 and Apex Legends. That puts it ahead of GTA Online, Madden, Overwatch, Rocket League and even Minecraft on Xbox.
Starfield at #6
Xbox
On Steam, the numbers are similarly impressive. Starfield is still putting up 50,000 concurrent player peaks a night, which have remained remarkably steady. Yes, it’s going down over time, but again, we are two months into the release of a single player game here, and we just do not see performance like this often, if ever (Baldur’s Gate is going even harder, but PC is its main platform). It’s also important to keep in mind that Starfield is on PC Game Pass, so these numbers would be higher if it was Steam-only and not available “for free” if you want to deal with a worse storefront.
Finally, there’s the performance of Xbox as a whole. The gaming unit made $3.9 billion this past quarter, its largest Q1 ever. That was driven at least in part by Starfield’s performance, where it sparked the single highest day of Xbox Game Pass in the history of the service, part of the quarter’s 13% increase in content and service revenue, actually offsetting a 7% drop in hardware sales. Wild.
It is really hard to measure Starfield’s success because of Microsoft’s Bethesda acquisition and convoluted release strategy. I think if Bethesda was still independent we would see just normal PC, PlayStation and Xbox sales numbers and they would be huge. But if you sift through the data you can see just how well Starfield is performing, even if it doesn’t end up showered with rewards at the end of the year here.
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