I doubt that a PS5 release would've helped Starfield – Xbox got what it wanted
This year saw Microsoft’s big bet purchasing Bethesda come to fruition with the release of Starfield. But, in the end, was it worth making it an Xbox Series X|S exclusive?
Pretty much since I got into playing video games some 25 years ago – I’m old, I know – I recognised pretty quickly that it’s exclusive games that sell consoles. And while AAA development has gotten so expensive these days due to ongoing advancements in technology, it’s still primarily the reason why I get excited about the likes of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 launching on PS5, or Starfield launching on Xbox Series X – because you simply can’t play them anywhere else (other than an expensive PC)!
I don’t think it’s controversial to say that Xbox has had a real problem securing console exclusives ever since the tail-end of the Xbox One era. Plus, when there finally is an exclusive, it’s usually fed as a drip, usually resulting in some degree of disappointment be that in the form of length (Hi-Fi Rush), technical performance (Redfall) and so on. The entire reason Microsoft purchased Bethesda in 2020, and most recently Activision Blizzard for $69 billion in the Microsoft Activision deal, is to plug this gap. Whereas PlayStation has built up a steady stream of first-party studios, the Xbox Series X has suffered from delayed development pipelines that have left many players wondering why they even own the console.
That is until a little game called Starfield was released this year, being a game treated as the coveted solution to this ‘lack of exclusives’ issue currently unique to the Xbox platform. Admittedly, even PlayStation has only had Marvel’s Spider-Man this year, with Nintendo blowing both current-gen consoles out of the water with utterly excellent first-party releases like Pikmin 4, Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Super Mario Bros Wonder and more.
It’s now been a month-and-a-half since Bethesda’s wildly ambitious space RPG released, so I thought it worth considering: was it worth it, and did it even need the support of releasing on PS5 in the first place? Well, yes and no. I should preface this by saying that I’m no Starfield fan. For me, it still exhibits the same fundamental problems I had with games like The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim and Fallout 4, despite the Creation engine being upgraded. In my eyes, it isn’t enough to create Skyrim but better; it’s not an improved continuation to make Bethesda RPGs great again, but rather a complete teardown.
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To the stars
That said, the results from Microsoft’s financial earnings report for its Q1 2024 performance would suggest that I am completely wrong. Xbox content and services were said to have improved by 13% – a record-breaking figure for the gaming division – within the window that Starfield released. This was primarily driven by a sharp rise in Xbox Game Pass subscriptions and strong first-party support, meaning that Starfield did a lot of heavy lifting in terms of getting more people playing on Xbox.
Signs of Starfield’s early accomplishments were also touted by Bethesda itself when the studio revealed that a whopping 10 million players had at least started it within the first week. So far, so successful, or so it seems. I would argue, however, that what this sudden leap in Xbox’s financials proves is not that Starfield is a good game per se, but that the Xbox model of releasing one big first-party exclusive per quarter can work when the platform is able to pull it off. The problem is right now, Xbox is struggling to hit this goal. In 2023, it was only Redfall and Starfield that could be called true exclusives, both of which were incubated by Bethesda and not Xbox proper.
So, would Starfield have enjoyed a better level of sales or excitement had it been released on PlayStation? After all, that was the original plan before Bethesda became a first-party Xbox studio and it became an exclusive. In all honesty? Probably, but not by much. The PS5 has sold somewhere in the region of 40 million units since it was released alongside the Xbox Series X, which might sound like a lot of untapped players but doesn’t account for those who own both consoles (like me). Then there’s the fact that despite Xbox content being 13% up, the same earnings report had Xbox hardware down 7% compared to the previous quarter.
Starfield was a pretty good boost for Xbox Game Pass subscriptions, then, but not when it comes to shifting Xbox Series X consoles. Plus, we won’t know until the next quarter how many of those players will stay subscribed. Usually, retention wouldn’t be indicative of a game’s overall success, but that’s the metric Xbox has imposed on itself seeing as it stopped reporting sales numbers for both hardware and software a while ago. It may have sold well on PS5, but then the standard £69.99 / $69.99 / AU$119.95 price would be a hard sell compared to an Xbox Game Pass subscription.
I’m sure if Xbox had its way, it would like to have a Starfield-tier AAA game loaded for its release calendar at least once per year. So far, even though the drip on the PlayStation side has been drying up too, this is exactly what Sony’s console has been able to achieve. Console exclusives matter and in my mind, they always will. I’m hopeful that when the likes of Fable, Avowed and Clockwork Revolution release it’ll finally move the Xbox needle. For now, however, whatever success Starfield gave the platform looks to have mostly ended up being limited to short-term gains, regardless of whether it came to PS5 or not.
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