Highlights
- Starfield has become Europe’s fifth fastest-selling game of 2023, surpassing popular titles like Resident Evil 4 remake and Final Fantasy 16.
- The game’s success was not surprising considering its popularity on Steam before its release and its day-one debut on Xbox Game Pass, which contributed to six million players in just two days.
- Despite its same-day release on Xbox Game Pass potentially lowering its sales ranking, Starfield’s five-day early access period helped offset losses and solidify its successful launch.
Starfield is Europe’s fifth fastest-selling 2023 game, having surpassed the likes of the Resident Evil 4 remake and Final Fantasy 16, newly released data reveals. This bit of insight into the RPG’s commercial performance sheds more light on the extent of Starfield’s immensely successful launch.
The fact that Bethesda’s latest title is enjoying massive sales should come as no surprise, not least because Starfield already became a big hit on Steam before it even released. Its day-one Xbox Game Pass debut also contributed to its success, pushing it to six million players two days into its September 6 release. Starfield hence boasts the title of the biggest launch in Bethesda’s history by a decent margin.
Further illustrating that success is a new report from Game Sales Data (GSD), which estimates that Starfield was comfortably the best-selling game in Europe during the week ending September 10. Looking at the bigger picture, the RPG had the fifth-largest European game launch of 2023, having only been surpassed by Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Diablo 4, and the best-selling Hogwarts Legacy. Starfield thus outperformed the Resident Evil 4 remake, Final Fantasy 16, F1 23, Dead Island 2, and NBA 2K23, which make up the bottom half of the said top ten.
And though Bethesda’s latest RPG is largely responsible for September 2023 being one of the best Xbox Game Pass months ever, its same-day release on Microsoft’s subscription platform almost certainly hurt its ranking on GSD’s European launch week chart for 2023. Namely, Starfield’s very presence on Xbox Game Pass likely lowered its sales, which are the only metrics tracked by the GSD.
On the other hand, the game’s five-day early access period offset some of those losses, as the newly published chart also includes its pre-September 6 sales, making its launch week ten days long. And while Xbox Game Pass likely cannibalized Starfield’s week-one sales to a greater extent than its two-part release helped prop them up, the early access period must have helped mitigate the impact of the RPG’s immediate addition to Microsoft’s subscription service nonetheless.
Microsoft, the owner of Bethesda parent ZeniMax Media, is unlikely to be bothered with that state of affairs. On the contrary, the tech giant has long insisted that direct sales are merely one of its avenues for reaching customers, while repeatedly labeling Xbox Game Pass as its flagship gaming offering. And while the full impact of Bethesda’s latest hit has yet to be determined, some industry watchers believe that the Starfield effect has already been hugely beneficial to Xbox sales.
Starfield is available now on PC and Xbox Series X/S.