Daniel VLCC 💚, 🐉😎🤟

Starfield has sold 140K copies on PS5 a week after launch (@alineaanalytics estimates). While these would be decent numbers for many ports, it’s not fantastic for a port of the biggest Bethesda RPG in a decade (although launch-aligned, it's selling faster than other Xbox games that came to Xbox in the past six months, minus CoD). Still, Starfield's lukewarm PS5 sales obviously raise questions about the long-term viability of Xbox's delayed multiplatform releases (Starfield came to PS5 2.5 years after Xbox/Steam). Since Starfield’s PS5 launch and the Free Lanes update on April 7, the Steam version of Starfield also sold an additional 55K copies ($2.3M revenue) at the same $50 price point. This pushed Starfield’s total Steam revenue past the $200M milestone. Starfield had already moved 3.7M copies on Steam before the PS5 port dropped. And even the Xbox version sold over 1M despite Game Pass cannibalising sales (8M folks played it via a sub). The Venn diagram of Starfield prospects on Xbox and those subscribed to Game Pass is almost a big fat circle. That's lost revenue. All in, Starfield has cleared over $300M in revenue across all platforms. That’s hugely successful in a vacuum (ayy). But, as I hinted at the top, in the context of a Bethesda budget and a decade-long development cycle, Starfield has likely barely broken even. Xbox has been gunning for profitability lately. This is at odds with Game Pass’ stagnating subscriber numbers and the subscription model cannibalising premium sales on Xbox consoles. Honestly, part of Starfield’s lower-than-expected performance is because it did more of the same and didn’t really build on the schools of design brought in by Breath of the Wild and Elden Ring and even other spacefaring games. Players loved these games. I actually enjoyed my time with Starfield. It delivered another pretty good Bethesda game. That was enough for me, and it might have cut it 10 years ago, but many players have moved on. This is reflected in our sentiment data. Our data suggests Crimson Desert, which builds on some of the more experimental things Breath of the Wild did, is on track to overtake Starfield’s total lifetime copies sold by the end of the year. Ironically, this wouldn’t be true if Starfield had launched day-and-date on PS5 and had not been on Game Pass on Xbox and PC. While Sharma is promising a return to the renegade past of Xbox, hinting at exclusivity and stuff, that's going to be a tough sell for Microsoft, I reckon. Big deep dive with a lot more data on Substack (link's in my bio).