Starfield's a Major Hit: Starfield leads September sales, instantly becomes 2023's 7th best-selling game in a few weeks
- Thread starter Quellyford
- Start date
Think "disgusting" is a pretty strong word especially as it includes the first major expansion as well. I used my MS points to buy it and cant wait to see where they take it
Circana is the new name for what was previously the NPD, which is basically just the US. Big market, but not the whole picture compared to global.
OP
OP
Yeah, thanks for being kind about it, I didn't take offense :)
I am just hoping others who made a similar comment in a less kind way saw that post and understand why I think this might deserve a thread. Cheers!
The mainstream continues to choose games to the chagrin of some.
Nice, hopefully they support it for a while. I like the game but don't love it. Would like to see more points of interest to make exploration more rewarding, I don't think even double what they have now is enough but with expansions and mods it'll be much better. Updating proc gen and adding bodies of liquid would be transformative too. I wish they could revamp space and at least make planets and their moons explorable bubbles if there was more to do in space the frequency of load screens would be reduced and the game would feel bigger.
When Starfield released earlier last quarter, it was critically mixed and had 83 score on MetaCritic. The game was missing a lot of the special Betheda magic. A Jason Schreier exposé revealed a tumultuous and disastrous development cycle that led to Pete Hines leaving Betheda because of how far this game strayed from Bethedas's DNA.
And through all that, Xbox leadership rightfully took flak for Betheda´s failures. Leadership should have intervened earlier in the game's development, to help Betheda steer the game towards a more positive path.
A few weeks after Starfield release, through Xbox's keen stewardship, we have the sales numbers of this game under the Zenimax banner: Starfield by Bethesda Game Studios. And the word around the grapevine is that for all intents and purposes, Starfield has benefited from an entire year of QA testing and polish, backed behind the full might of Microsoft's resources. A few days after it´s release, we finally saw something very special happen: Microsoft joining the likes of Sony and Nintendo in having a Circana-NPD top 10 title YTD that dominates the zeitgeist.
And through all that, Xbox leadership rightfully took flak for Betheda´s failures. Leadership should have intervened earlier in the game's development, to help Betheda steer the game towards a more positive path.
A few weeks after Starfield release, through Xbox's keen stewardship, we have the sales numbers of this game under the Zenimax banner: Starfield by Bethesda Game Studios. And the word around the grapevine is that for all intents and purposes, Starfield has benefited from an entire year of QA testing and polish, backed behind the full might of Microsoft's resources. A few days after it´s release, we finally saw something very special happen: Microsoft joining the likes of Sony and Nintendo in having a Circana-NPD top 10 title YTD that dominates the zeitgeist.
OP
OP
I don't think you're too much of a hater, although maybe calling it "disgusting" is a stretch. In this particular case, you didn't only get Early Access, but you also got the entire first Story Expansion (as well as some digital goodies and DLC skins). For $30, you have to guess that isn't too far off from what the actual Story Expansion will really cost, anyway.
So my thoughts are that while the trend isn't amazing, as long as you're still getting other tangible value out of the prepayment such as the story expansion here, my opinion is that it is not quite as bad as you think.
No it doesn't lmao a game being on game pass doesn't make it special whatsoever
I think the people saying "crazy given Game Pass!" are either underestimating Bethesda RPGs or overestimating Game Pass' reach (or both).
This goes doubly so for PC, where most players aren't going to go out of their way to join a subscription service for one game. It was maddening seeing so many people in the Steam concurrent players/sales thread saying things like "surprising so many people are buying on Steam when it's on Game Pass for free (author's note: arrggghh Game Pass isn't free god damn it)," or whatever weird similar posts like that.
Starfield was always going to sell well, Game Pass or not. And that's a great thing.
It can be safely assumed that Steam made up the vast, vast majority of sales on PC.
This goes doubly so for PC, where most players aren't going to go out of their way to join a subscription service for one game. It was maddening seeing so many people in the Steam concurrent players/sales thread saying things like "surprising so many people are buying on Steam when it's on Game Pass for free (author's note: arrggghh Game Pass isn't free god damn it)," or whatever weird similar posts like that.
Starfield was always going to sell well, Game Pass or not. And that's a great thing.
It can be safely assumed that Steam made up the vast, vast majority of sales on PC.
wonder if you felt this strongly for specific sales threads about zelda, elden ring, etc, etc.
Yup. It's a 6/10 game through and through, even my friend who's a massive Bethesda fanboy said the same, and for the record I don't hate their games and really wanted it to be special.
It's more about the scale of its success in the overall yearly best-sellers list, since it was only selling for a couple weeks and still landed in the top-10 for totals. If you look at what it displaced, it really is a huge success. There have been threads exactly like this for as far back as I can remember, so this isn't unusual. Closer to the start of the year we certainly had it for TotK; It keeps overall Circana discussion a little more balanced with the variety of info in there, and the discussion around a particularly big release happen normally elsewhere.
He doesn't seem quite happy with this monumental news.
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Man if massive disappointmenta sell this well imagine what's going to happen when they release actual fun games huh. /s
Yes. Quite a few. Check the player count threads from last month.
Starfield not selling because of (reasons) has been a narrative throughout the whole year. It is the most concern trolled game of the last 5 years.
News that a game sold well and you just expect us to be ok with it?!?!
User warned: Thread whining
Those were threads made because specific numbers were met and announced by the publisher of the game. This is a thread that takes the exact same information from the Circana sales thread to make a new thread; there's no reason for it whatsoever as it imparts no new information. Plus we've already had threads about Starfield doing well sales-wise anyways.
I don't care about console war shit and own an Xbox, but I do find it fascinating what people are allowed to post here - I thought this forum generally had a rule against duplicative threads
User warned: Thread whining
To be fair so far we've had:
A pre release thread thanking Microsoft for their keen stewardship in delivering this game to use
A congratulatory thread for 6 million users
A congratulatory thread for 1 million concurrent users
A congratulatory thread for 10 million users
And now this thread
I can see how it's starting to grate for some. We get it already, Starfield is the greatest success ever, three cheers for Starfield
I'm not denying the undeniable or anything. But this thread is based off of information already available to be discussed in a different thread. I think it'd be equally pointless to make a thread celebrating the Circana sales of Mortal Kombat 1 in the context of fighting games or something; that thread already exists
Report the thread with your explanation if you think it's actually a problem. Mods may even agree with you, but otherwise repeatedly complaining about a thread-topic ("thread whining") is specifically against the rules.
I see you have less than 100 total posts, so you may be less familiar with the forum, but that "Report" button below any posts (including the OP) would let you do that, and add text for an explanation of why. It's quick-and-easy, and it's way better than arguing with non-mods about what moderation should be happening.
If people don't care for the threads they can just ignore them simple as.
I mean if folks can't be happy about success stories to the point of the information being grating, they should take a break from the internet or just set the threads to ignore.
Sure no denying that. Just talking about the legs compared to those two game that were mentioned, considering the current player count Starfield has was the player count Skyrim started to avarage 4-5 years in after its release.
I'm sure the Starfield launch is gigantic, and I'm happy for it because I love their games, but using rankings as a measure of success is useless. We all know how big of a franchise Call of Duty is, and that is the franchise that kept prior Bethesda games that launched in November from reaching #1. Just because Starfield now ended up being #1 when releasing in September doesn't make it a bigger success then their prior releases. Maybe it is, but we just don't know based on rankings.
Understood, this is actually informative and I appreciate it. Thanks
Wow, I assume it's in descending order? You have to scroll down pretty far to find it.Probably not that great.
It sits very low in the global Steam top sellers right now. BG3 in comparison, a game released one month earlier, is still in the top 5 paid games. Even Skyrim is still above Starfield.
Steam Search
store.steampowered.com
Even old games like DOS2 and No Man's Sky are ahead.
ChatGPT, please write a ResetEra post about Starfield being the top selling game in September.
True. Though when Starfield hit 1million concurrent only 200k were on steam. So we can roughly say only 20% of the playerbase is on steam.
That's not all that's in that quote. It's Microsoft's first #1 game since 2018. This isn't just talking about previous Bethesda titles. I figured Game Pass would mean they wouldn't hit that spot anymore because so many millions of gamers play games at launch through there.
How are folks coping with all of this? Must be hard to get through each week when a new Starfield thread might show up at any moment.
Whilst true, those games have also just had a deep discount.
It's dropped fast down the sales charts in Steam, but that's not abnormal for most games.
Trying to figure out what the OP was banned for, lol. That stat about it being the first BGS game to debut at #1 is pretty surprising to me although I am sure a lot of that is due to the fact NPD didn't seem to include PC game sales in charts for most of their releases.
The game has some flaws but at it's heights it's absolutely astoundingly good. Happy for them and can't wait for the expansion to eventually hit.
The game has some flaws but at it's heights it's absolutely astoundingly good. Happy for them and can't wait for the expansion to eventually hit.
And these sales figures is why Bethesda will continue with the same tired formula regardless of (extremely valid) fan complaints.
It just works.
It just works.
My response to this and the other quote saying I don't know what FOMO is:
These early access times are specifically planned for weekend play. It's not like, "hey play it Tuesday instead of friday", it's "hey if you want to play this game over the weekend, you're going to need to drop some cash". Which I think is absolutely predatory. And honestly, especially when the game is free on gamepass, something we all already pay a subscription for day 1 releases of first party titles.
And while it does come with a nebulous expansion, we don't know what it is, how much content will be in it, or what it's standalone value is. It was only a $10 add on to the actual cost of the game.
And in the interest of transparency, I did also pay for the $35 "play early experience" on 2 different xbox accounts.
Also I'm really not trying to discount the success of the game, but for a huge chunk of gamers, the game was effectively 50% off if you wanted to play it over the long holiday weekend.
why would it grate unless you have an agenda against the game? threads are extremely easily ignored, yet you seem to have taken note of how many different threads there have been, or specifically looked it up
seems like a you problem