The PlayStation 5 release of Starfield has provided Bethesda with a second bite of the dehydrated space-apple, as Starfield topped the US sales chart during PS5 launch week.
“It’s the first time Starfield has led the weekly US best-selling titles chart since [the] week ending Sept 2, 2023,” noted US games-market analyst Mat Piscatella, who shared the update on Bluesky. For reference, Starfield launched on PC and Xbox 6th September 2023.
Starfield is reckoned to have sold 140,000 copies on PlayStation 5 in its first week on sale, a tally possibly inflated by the nearby excitement surrounding the space voyage of Artemis 2. The PlayStation version of Starfield also benefits from years of updates done to the game, and the coinciding Free Lanes and Terran Armada updates.
However, Starfield had a bumpy landing on PlayStation 5, with players reporting bugs and glitches that made the game unplayable, and prompted some to seek refunds. Various Starfield PS5 hotfixes have been deployed since.
Also, while topping the chart seems like a big success, it’s worth noting that there was very little to compete with Starfield in the week it was released on PS5. Alinea Analytics analyst Rhys Elliott went as far as to describe the 140k sales figure as “lukewarm” for Starfield, comparing it unfavourably to the 3.7m copies the game has sold on Steam and the 1m sold on Xbox, despite being “cannibalised” there by Game Pass. “In the context of a Bethesda budget and a decade-long development cycle, Starfield has likely barely broken even,” Elliott wrote.
Starfield’s fortunes may yet continue to rise with the advent of a Switch 2 version, which remains unconfirmed but was sighted on Taiwan’s age ratings website recently. Such sightings are usually a good indication of what’s to come.
Bethesda pledged recently to support Starfield “for years” and said it does have long-term plans for the game. The renewed interest in the game, coming from the new version(s), will no doubt help encourage Bethesda here, but for how long? That’s the question.
Starfield failed to convince at launch. “Starfield pairs near-impossible breadth with a classic Bethesda aptitude for systemic physics, magnetic sidequests, and weird vignettes. But in sacrificing direct exploration for the sake of sheer scale, there’s nothing to bind it together,” Chris wrote in Eurogamer’s Starfield review.
