Starfield is a flop on PS5 and has ‘barely broken even’ says analyst

The PS5 launch of Starfield has not been a major hit but is the problem the game itself or Microsoft only releasing its ports years after the Xbox version?

Bethesda is not the most prolific of game studios. Despite having more than 500 staff, their internal developer Bethesda Game Studios has only made four games in the last 15 years (Skyrim, Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and Starfield) and so if any of them underperform they’re in a sticky situation.

Fallout 76 did recover, to some degree, from its underwhelming launch but Starfield has had no such reprieve, with its first DLC expansion only making things worse. The best hope for its redemption was last week’s PlayStation 5 version, which launched alongside new free DLC and a new story expansion – as well as complaints that crash bugs made it ‘unplayable’.

Bethesda themselves were keen to insist that this isn’t ‘Starfield 2.0’, although it is the next best thing. What it isn’t though, is an immediate sales success, with analyst group Alinea Analytics estimated that it has so far sold only 140,000 copies on PlayStation 5.

This is only an estimate but since Bethesda is unlikely to ever release official figures publicly, it’s all anyone has to go on. It’s not a terrible number, if it was just a random port, but as one of the key would-be Xbox exclusives, from one of the most respected developers in the business, it’s disappointing.

However, the bar chart in the tweet below is a bit misleading, because it seems to be total lifetime sales and obviously Starfield has only just come out – and will likely have a fairly long tail, even if it’s still overall disappointing.

Even so, it seems clear that Starfield is not going to be a major hit on PlayStation 5, where Forza Horizon 5 remains by far the most popular Xbox port so far.

Alinea Analytics’ Rhys Elliott suggests that part of the problem is Microsoft’s delayed release of PlayStation 5 games, with Starfield arriving two and a half years after the Xbox and PC versions – with even Forza Horizon 6 expected to arrive first on Xbox.

However, in the case of Starfield it’s debatable how much its weak PlayStation 5 sales are due to it arriving late, and how much to the game’s poor reputation. After all, Forza Horizon 5 was much older when it arrived on PlayStation 5, having first appeared on Xbox four years beforehand.

There are no sales figures for Starfield (Bethesda talks only of 15 million ‘players’, where most will have accessed it for no additional fee via Game Pass) but Alinea Analytics estimates that the game has sold less than 5 million copies so far – which, again, is not bad for a normal game but disappointing for a Bethesda title that’s been 10 years in the making.

Arguably more importantly, Starfield is also estimated to have only made around $300 million in revenue which, as recent revelations about the average budget size for triple-A games makes clear, means that if it has broken even it’s only just.

Given Microsoft’s reported emphasis on profitability at the moment, that will have created some difficult moments in the boardroom and at the very least makes the chances of a Starfield 2 extremely unlikely.

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