2023 Bethesda adventure Starfield finally made it to PlayStation 5 last week, alongside a couple of major content updates across all platforms. This combo propelled it to the top of Circana’s ranking of best-selling titles in the U.S. for its launch week, a spot it hasn’t sat in since its initial release. Not that the competition was especially stiff.
This comes from the above post by Circana senior director Mat Piscatella. Timing-wise, this is happening thanks to Starfield‘s launch two weeks ago on PlayStation, which coincided with the release of a sizeable free update, Free Lanes, as well as a paid expansion: Terran Armada. Free Lanes brings new weapons, quests, and a new vehicle to the game in an effort to improve space exploration, while Terran Armada is all about stopping the titular armada from attacking a bunch of planets, and includes even more new weapons and ships. Both updates are, per Todd Howard, intended for people who already love the game, as opposed to being a specific effort to draw in new players. “I think it’s the kind of thing where if you love Starfield, we think you’re going to love this,” he said in an interview with Kinda Funny.
All this likely means that the PS5 release on its own is pulling the majority of the weight here in raising Starfield’s sales numbers. It’s currently available on Xbox Game Pass, meaning we’re likely not going to see a massive surge of new full game purchases there. In total, Rhys Elliott from Alinea Analytics estimated it only sold about 140,000 copies during its PS5 launch week. Compare that to its initial launch, “the biggest Bethesda game launch of all time,” which reached over six million players on September 6 of 2023 and topped sales charts despite also being on Game Pass from the (space) jump.
It’s also prooobably worth pointing out that Starfield didn’t have a ton of hefty competition for sales during its PS5 launch week. Its PS5 release on April 7 was surrounded by the launch of Pokémon Champions on Nintendo Switch and…basically nothing else major. And Pokémon Champions is a free-to-start game. And it’s digital-only. Circana does not receive digital sales data from Nintendo, so there’s truly no telling how much better or worse Pokémon Champions did than Starfield.
According to Piscatella who spoke to Kotaku for this story, following Starfield on the U.S. sales charts at number two was MLB The Show 26 (with those numbers not including Xbox Series X or Nintendo Switch digital sales), followed by Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 at number three. Piscatella adds that this was Starfield’s fourth-biggest full game sales week in the U.S. since launch, being beaten only (unshockingly) by its first three weeks on the market. PlayStation 5 sales accounted for 95 percent of its new full game sales during that launch week (this excludes add-on content sales, like the expansion).
As far as actual player counts go, Piscatella tells us that Starfield jumped up to 26th from 140th in player count rankings on Steam for that PS5 and update launch week, and on Xbox it leaped from 56th to 18th. It debuted at 61st overall on PlayStation 5.
So is this news unquestionably a good thing for Starfield? Absolutely. It did well on PS5 in the U.S. and is clearly seeing a surge of interest now that it’s on a platform with a much larger install base. As Piscatella told us, “It was a solid debut for the PS5 version of the game. But, as always, we’ll have to see how its momentum carries over into future weeks.” Are we about to see a Starfield renaissance? Maybe? The rumor is that it might show up on the Nintendo Switch 2 later, which will likely give it another boost. But Howard also warned that we should not expect a Starfield 2.0 to draw in new fans. As he said in the same Kinda Funny interview: “If Starfield is something that didn’t connect with you right away, or you bounced off it, or found it boring in places, I don’t think this is going to change that fundamentally.” So if you’ve been waiting for it to come to your platform of choice before you go to space, there’s plenty to hope for. But if you just wished Starfield was something different…sorry, you might be stuck waiting for The Elder Scrolls 6. Whenever that is.
