Starfield Tops 14 Million Players, Over 40 Hour Average Playtime Per Player - Sales
by William D'Angelo , posted on 16 June 2024 / 4,206 Views
Bethesda Game Studios boss Todd Howard in an interview with YouTubers MarMattyPalys revealed Starfield has surpassed 14 million players with an average playtime of over 40 hours per player.
This figure is up from 13 million players on December 20, 2023, 12 million players on December 2, 2023, 10 million players on September 19, 2023, and six million players as of the morning of September 7, 2023.
"Starfield has 14 million players, and the average playtime is still over 40 hours a player," said Howard. "It's just like a staggering amount of time in-game."
The Shattered Space story expansion for Starfield is set to release in the Fall and Howard revealed it will be a similar in size to Fallout 4: Far Harbor.
"One of the things that we always liked about it from the get-go and I don't think people realize is that Shattered Space, the bulk of that expansion pack, once you get to the city and the planet, it pretty much takes place there," he said.
"It allows us to build a landscape like we would traditionally do and have the city and the quests. That story takes place there, and the landscape, content-wise, we're looking at kind of like what we did with Far Harbor on Fallout 4.
"This is a scope that works for our development in doing this kind of annual story expansion type. Really excited about that and it lets us kind of do some things the way we would in previous games and give people not completely that experience because it's still Starfield, but this new kind of alien world that you're able to explore and it takes place there."
Starfield released for the Xbox Series X|S, PC, and Xbox Game Pass in September 2023.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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~8 million of those (14m) players are probably from gamepass. Still that means it has still sold through like 6m+, which isn't bad at all.
13m of those 14m were all last year and we have a rough idea from end of year lists how well Starfield sold. 11th in NA, 37th in Europe. That would be closer to 3-4m most likely. It was 5 places above FFXVI in NA and 5 places below in Europe(+ also significantly behind in Japan obviously) FFXVI has not been updated since its 3M first week.
I got down voted within the hour by the same three xbox fanboy that down vote every comment not praising of Xbox, what a shocker. I'm pretty sure i can even name the three.
Or maybe it has to do with disagreeing with your takes. Don't pretend like you don't stir the pot around.
What take? I posted a literal facts about where it finished in year end sales numbers. Please tell me your “Take” then? Explain why my estimate is wrong and stop just being a fanboy.
I said takes, as in your other comments too. You do know calling others fanboys doesn't help you? Lol
We do frown on calling people fanboys. It just doesn't help anything. It is just negative for the sake of being negative. Causes fights where there doesn't need to be.
So cut it out.
Just to let you know, you get a ban warning or temporally banned on here for using the f word that rhymes with tanboy. I know because it's happened to me before
SteamDB lists 3 estimates from external sites:
Play tracker - 1.7M
Gamalytic - 1.71m
VGInsights - 3.94m
VGInsights is the outlier here and VG insights is known for massively over tracking everything and then adjusting it down. It currently has Helldivers 2 at 11.32m(that’s after being adjusted down already) when it’s around 7M on PC.
Playtrcker tends to slightly under track so a reasonable estimate would be around 2-2.3M on Steam. We also know that in NA it sold the majority of its sales on PC(as per Circana full 2023 report) and as NA is Xbox’s strongest territory for Hardware and a relatively weaker PC market(compared to Europe and non-Japan Asia) we can safely assume that the majority of sales on PC holds for worldwide. This would put the estimate in the region of 3-4m which is consistent with Starfields position in end of year charts relative to games that mostly have known sales figures for at lease some periods.
Nice, hope we get a release date for shattered space soon!
Good to see people playing it. Its a great game. Looking forward to the DLC
After a couple of years it's coming to PlayStation
For comparison Forza Horizon 5 took 2 months to reach 15m and 7 months to reach 20m. FH5 is on Xbox one also.
The fact Starfield only picked up 1M additional players in 6 months must be somewhat worrying for Bethesda.
1mil over six months is still rather strong legs, especially with Xbox hardware sinking as it is. That tracks for around 3-4mil during 2024. For reference, Zelda TotK is only expected to have received 700k additional sales up until now during 2024.
These are players, not sales and the barriers to paying the game is not the $60 price but a month of gamepass and free for 30m+ already subscribing.
You're comparing one of Xbox's most successful, if not currently most successful IP to a new IP. Not exactly a fair comparison, especially with FH5 appealing to a much broader audience and being easier to pick up and play for anyone. That's like saying, it's worrying Ghost of Tsushima hasn't sold as much as Spider-man 2.
FH was not a massive IP, and FH5 was the first really successful game. The first 6 Motorsports games + 3 Horizon games had sold 16m combined until end of 2016. So comparisons of the IP to spiderman is ridiculous.
Calling it a new IP is misleading as its a Bethesda game, and everyone knew what it was. It was continuation mechanically of Skyrim and Fallout. It's a new IP in the same way Elden Ring or Cyberpunk 2077 were, which was irrelevant to their sales.
Bullshit. Forza Horizon really took off after 3 and never looked back. It's a massive IP now. If Xbox consoles had similar sales to PS, FH5 would be in the ballpark of 50 million players by now. I made an equivalent comparison between GoT and Spider-man 2 because that's the level of lunacy you brought to this comparison. I can interchange Spider-man 2 with something else if it makes you feel better. Still doesnt change anything.
A new IP is a new IP. Doesn't matter how you want to spin it. Starfield is Bethesda's most complicated game to get into by far, unlike Fallout and ES which are fairly easy to pick up and play. I know this after some friends giving up early on because it was too complicated, even though they were fans of previous Bethesda titles.
I posted official Microsoft sales data. It “Blew up” after they started tracking player count instead of sales and the game was available to everyone with a PC or Xbox at the cost of using a gamepass free trial or playing it on Steam over one of it’s Free Weekends. Practically everyone in the world has had a chance to play it for free at some point. The Starfield data shows that a “player” does’t mean much when 57.18% of people on Xbox didn’t even make it to level 5 on Starfield or 47.9% of people didn’t complete the first mission.
If you don’t like the comparison then what about a direct comparison with Cyberpunk 2077, another game that didn’t live up to the hype. That game sold 13m in its first month as a full price game. Starfield taking 6 months to get 13m “players” while it bring on a subscription service with 30m+ subscribers seems very weak. It looks like Starfield sold around 3-4m copies, had no significant impact of Gamepass Subscriber count and no significant impact on Xbox hardware sales.
Starfield is one of the games rumoured to have a PS5 port coming. So, it's sales aren't finished yet. I think the game is terrible and doesn't deserve any to be honest, but let's see what PS5 does for it
You already told us you haven't played Starfield, but still gave it a 3/10 rating.
Alot of people like myself are waiting for the story dlc
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