Starfield Tops 15 Million Players - Sales
by William D'Angelo , posted on 19 November 2024 / 2,252 Views
Bethesda announced Starfield has surpassed 15 million players.
This figure is up from 14 million players on June 16, 2024, 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.
"Thank you to the over 15 million players who are adventuring through the stars in Starfield!" said Bethesda.
"We’re thrilled that so many of you have embarked on this journey with us, and we appreciate your feedback. We are always looking for ways to improve your experience playing the game and wanted to give our community an update on the most recent adjustments we’ve made to Starfield."
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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Tell us how many bought the game
I think you’re on the wrong website there bud
Its not that deep. Its a new IP, has 15 million play it, it's free on GamePass and is only available on PC and Xbox. You are trying so hard to downplay this game.
Ehh... 15 million isnt really that impressive for a Bethesda game
Especially one that launched into Gamepass
Hopefully they actually focus on giving people what they want with ES6
Honestly if like 10million of that is from gamepass players playing it for free... yeah.
15m on PC and Xbox.
Good but flawed game. 7/10. 214 hrs so far
So probably only a few million in sales. Looked like a cool idea, apparently just executed badly. Hopefully in however many years when the sequel comes out they can make a much better game.
Bring it to PS5, Phil. We know it's coming. Quintuple those numbers, brah.
Bringing it to PS5 won't do much good at all but we know MS is desperate at this point and wouldn't surprise anybody if it did come to PS5. Also, to quintuple those numbers you'd need like 95% of PS5 owners to "buy" it lol
Let's even eliminate "buying" the game for the +30million Xbox X/S consoles, the millions of PC gamers for a second here...…
......Of the +34million GP subs, not even half of the players wanted to even touch this game hahaha
And because it's "players" number and not actual sales, for all we know, 80% of those GP players just "demo" the game then didn't bother continuing.
Can someone check for me what's the percentage of players that got the achievement for the final chapter? Curious to know of the 15M players how many actually finished it.
2m new players in the last 11 months(covering a major DLC) seems very low. Even if that was all sales that would be considered pretty poor legs.
But how many bought the game and expansion dlc?
You could play the EA without buying the game though. I used MS reward points to get the upgrade and played through gamepass.
Yeah people are desperate to call this a flop but we just don't have the numbers. Its probably not met their expectations post launch... Didn't it have 12m players after a few months? So this is not the kind of legs we typically see with Bethesda but glad its not a flop and has a strong userbase
At a wild guess I think it's around 7m actually sold.
Mind baffling that people are still downplaying a new IP that launched on less platforms and managed to get 15m people play. Previous it was 14m with an average game time of 40hours.
Solid effort.
Being a new IP is irrelevant, people play games from their favourite studios. Elden Ring, the Last of US, Cyberpunk 2077(not technically a new IP) etc never struggled to get people interested in them based on the studios former games.
Starfield’s 15m players, while being on gamepass, is not particularly inspiring for a big showcase game. God of War: Ragnarok sold 15m units in 12 months being only on one platform. That’s sales, mostly at $70 a piece. Players would be around 20M(based on second hand sales, sharing etc.) without ever being available on a subscription service.
Yes and No
Following a favorite developer is a pretty new phenomenon that started mid-late PS4/XOne gen. Almost no one outside of the most hardcore ever cared what studio was actually making the game.
People play games if the game interests them. Unless you are solely referring to Fanboys who play whatever the developer dishes out, good and bad.
You also understand that Starfield is being played more than GoW R right?
So Starfield’s problem is that it’s not interesting?
Being played more in what regard? Ragnarok has definitely been played by more than 15m players…
I didn't realize PC was considered "less platform" these days
Compared to previous Bethesda games, which launched on more platforms, Star Field only launched on 2.
Pretty good sales, though I wonder how it compares to Fallout 4 or Skyrim.
You understand playing the game is the same, weather you rent it or own it right?
Yes, but financially it's not the same.
You understand there are more ways a business makes money than just physical sales, right?
We'll never get proper sales numbers, but we can use NPD's annual Top Tens to find out how well games sold in the USA, at least compared to other games.
Skyrim was the #2 game of 2011, behind Modern Warfare 3, and Fallout 4 was the #3 game of 2015, behind Black Ops 3 and Madden. Starfield wasn't even on the Top 10 for 2023. And it's not like Action-RPG's have stopped selling as well recently; GTA5 was in the Top 10 as recently as 2020, Elden Ring was the #2 game of 2022, Hogwarts Legacy was the #1 game of 2023, and Dragon's Dogma 2 was the #4 game for the first half of 2024.
I think it's safe to say that actual sales of Starfield are significantly behind those of Skyrim and Fallout 4.
While not in top 10, it was number 11 best seller for 2023. Good numbers, but I don't think anyone was realistically expecting sales matching 2 games in well established franchises, on less platforms, and launching on Game Pass.
Placed ahead of FFXVI, SMBW (physical), and REVI...though worth noting is Starfield only has USA, whereas all these other titles have JP, EU, and USA. My guess is prolly around 3.5mil in USA, and so, around 4.25mil WW in 2023 alone. (SMBW sold 11.96mil WW in 2023, I'd estimate around 5mil in USA, landing at around 3mil USA physical.) Pretty impressive!, especially when considering how much of the total player base is coming from GP.
Source (which may not be the most reliable...): https://www.statista.com/statistics/1285658/top-ranked-video-games-sales-annual/.
4.25m is probably not a million miles away but it probably overestimates a bit because the NPD is based on Revenue and a very high percentage of Starfield sales were the Premium Edition with early access at $100(there was estimated to be 2m players during early access) and the normal retail was $70 which is still higher than some of the comparisons.
It looks like the launch was pretty decent and then sales completely died. The players number has only increased 2m in the last 11 months. Thats likely under 500k sales.
Amazing achievement for such a terrible game
It's amazing how Starfield still manages to trigger you lot 😂
I'm not triggered, I just wanted ES6 instead. So much wasted time on a franchise with no future
Almost certainly has a future, people that worked on the game were already talking about sequel potential and how technology by the point they will be working on it (late 2030's after TES 6 and Fallout 5) will have advanced to the point where it won't hold back their vision like it did on the first game.
I see, so it's blame the technology. No Mans Sky was far better and it launched on weaker consoles. How do you explain that
NMS was terrible when it released and took years of updates to get it into a proper state. Starfield released in a somewhat better state than NMS, but they can't really afford to spend years updating and fixing it like Hello Games with NMS because it's development team needs to move on to TES 6 and Fallout 5 soon. One more expansion and a few more patches and they will probably be done supporting it.
NMS is also on an entirely different engine. Bethesda just weren't able to get Creation engine to do some of the things they wanted it to do, not while keeping elements in all Bethesda games that they wanted to keep. They believe they will be able to overcome those technological hurdles by the time Starfield 2 would be releasing after TES 6 and Fallout 5, and add things like full sized planets and in-atmosphere flight and space to atmosphere seamless transitions.
Did you forget the state of No Man Sky when it launched? It was worse than Starfield with much less content.
NMS was developed by a small studio and was released in 2016. Starfield was released by one of the most successful devs ever and released in 2023. It shouldn't even be a close contest but sadly, it is
What does any of that have to do with your original claim of No Man Sky being much better? Now you're backtracking and making excuses for No Man Sky since you can't stick with your original claim.
I still believe NMS is a much better space exploration game. You clearly don't agree with that, so I was just trying to meet you half way by calling it a "close contest". Even then though, why is a game from a small studio from 2016 competing with one of the most successful devs of all time
You said NMS was far better [at launch] and we said, no, because it wasn't. If you want to say it's better exploration game, sure. I can go along with that. But that wasn't what you were saying. NMS and Starfield really are completely different games with a space theme being the only connection. Starfield is an RPG first and foremost and that is what it focuses on. NMS is a survival game. The comparison really doesn't make sense. You're better of comparing NMS to Grounded instead of Starfield.
Starfield 2 probably around 2040
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