Let's talk about 'Starfield'
What the response to the game can tell us about the larger industry.
A few weeks ago, to mark four months since the release of the video game “Starfield,” gaming expert Amir Satvat posted a poll on LinkedIn asking his thousands of connections what their final rating of the game is. 54 percent of the 1,340 votes rated it a 6 or lower.
The results are hardly scientific, but I did think it reflected the overall, let’s say “enthusiasm,” for the game, and sparked a reasonable question: what happened to “Starfield”?
Since it was first announced in *checks notes* 2018 (!), anticipation was high for the sci-fi role-playing adventure game. It was marketed as the first new game universe in 25 years from Bethesda Game Studios, the company behind the “Elder Scrolls” and “Fallout” series. It was heralded as a potential lifeline for Xbox, which is in desperate need of new exclusive franchises like its competitors Nintendo (Zelda, Super Mario) and PlayStation (God of War, Uncharted, Last of Us, Spider-Man), especially after the reportedly disastrous making of and launch of “Redfall.” But when “Starfield” finally arrived in September, it seemed to do so without the kind of praise or excitement one might expect.
The critics reviews from many game news publications — like IGN, Kotaku, Polygon — were middling. Kotaku called it a “jack of all trades and master of none.” Game Informer gave it a positive 8.5 out of 10, but ultimately left it off its top games of the year, as did those other publications. It’s missed Game of the Year and other key nominations from industry awards like The Game Awards and the D.I.C.E. Awards; the former is voted on by game journalists and the latter by industry professionals, so it didn’t seem to blow away anyone on either side. Player reception has also seemed muted, and it has a 6.9 user score on the review aggregator Metacritic.
Of course, sales — like a movie’s box office — are the actual signs of a game’s “success,” but those figures are murky. As Bloomberg games reporter Jason Schreier noted: “Unlike Hollywood, where the box office data is public and the hits are easy to discern, the video-game industry guards its numbers like a dragon hoarding treasure.”
According to recent data from research firm Circana, “Starfield” was the No. 11 best-selling game of 2023, which on paper seems like a disappointing result for such a long-gestating title. But “Starfield” was also released day-one on Xbox’s subscription service Game Pass, so it’s unclear how many people actually bought the game, or just downloaded it with their Game Pass subscription (like I did). The best number we can go on is from the Xbox chief himself Phil Spencer, who said in December that the game had 12 million players — an intentionally vague stat that is different from paying customers, suggesting a lot of people probably used Game Pass to play.
So, with all that laid out, back to my original question, and others: What happened to “Starfield”? Is the game a misfire, or a victim of sky-high expectations? And what does this mean for Xbox, if anything?
It’s tough to evaluate the state of Xbox after Microsoft recently laid off 1,900 (!) game staffers, largely due to its acquisition of Activision Blizzard. It’s been a dreadful year so far for the games industry in that regard (Riot recently laid off over 500 staffers), and I didn’t want to get through this post without acknowledging that. But “Starfield” could say a lot about Game Pass. The game was probably the Netflix-like service’s biggest test yet, but I wonder what the discussion around the game would have been like if it wasn’t available day-one on the platform — if the sales figures would have been impressive enough to offset the game’s disappointing reviews, or if the reviews would have hurt game sales. Hollywood faced similar issues during the pandemic, when it more frequently debuted movies on streaming platforms as well as in movie theaters at the same time.
The movie industry has since shifted away from that strategy (save for a select few releases), as the streaming business has proven to be a tough one for some legacy studios, and they’ve realized that they are leaving money on the table by not giving movies a full theatrical release. What Microsoft/Xbox does with its next big release could say a lot about whether the companies learned a similar lesson.
For now, I think “Starfield” is both not quite up to par with what it could have been, but also a victim of Bethesda’s previous success. Maybe that’s a cop-out answer, but it’s also the most fair. The game isn’t a disaster by any stretch, but it also requires a ton of patience, relies heavily on exploration of barren planets, and, as many game reporters have pointed out, takes a long time to actually get “good".” That’s a tough sell for gamers who have become accustomed to blockbuster games on a grander scale than even many of Hollywood’s big-budget films. “Starfield” had the unfortunate timing of landing in a year where “Tears of the Kingdom,” “Spider-Man 2,” and “Baldur’s Gate 3” dominated the game space.
Ultimately, the response to “Starfield” may tell us more about the game industry than the game itself. The biggest and best games take years to develop, endless hours, and ballooning budgets, and after all of that, it could fail to live up to the “hype,” even if the hype was unfair from the beginning. Maybe “Starfield” isn’t just a victim of Bethesda’s success, but of the larger video game industry’s; consumer spending on video games in the US hit $47.5 billion in 2022, down from the record years of 2020 and 2021, but still above 2019. The same can’t be said of, say, the movie industry, which is still struggling to get back to pre-pandemic levels at the box office.
Needless to say, the game industry is enormous, but the best-selling games any given year are often dominated by franchise fare that fans already have a connection to, a category that “Starfield” — despite the talent behind it — doesn’t belong to. The biggest selling release of 2023 was the Harry Potter game “Hogwarts Legacy,” followed by tried-and-true new entries from “Call of Duty,” “Madden NFL,” “The Legend of Zelda,” “Diablo,” “Spider-Man,” and “Star Wars.” Sure, “Palworld” might be the biggest game in the world right now, but I’d bet its similarity to Pokémon (whether legal or not) has something to do with that.
It’s interesting that Hollywood is facing a somewhat opposite effect. After more than a decade of sequels and superhero movies dominating cinemas, “Barbie” and “Super Mario” topped the box office in 2023. While they are brands with a lot of consumer goodwill, they’ve never been turned into proper big-screen films before. And “Oppenheimer” — a three-hour biopic — wasn’t far behind. Meanwhile, new releases in long-running franchises like “Fast and Furious,” “Transformers,” and even Marvel crashed and burned.
Maybe it’s hard for a big-budget original game like “Starfield” to break through in a major way these days. Then again, “Elden Ring” was the No. 2 game of 2022. Hollywood screenwriter William Goldman famously wrote in his book “Adventures in the Screen Trade” that “Nobody knows anything.” Maybe the same applies to the video game industry.
And now for a games-centric news roundup…