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Bethesda Expected To Make $1 Billion On Starfield

Havoc2049

Member
Why should I care about what BAFTA thinks? They decide what is a AAA game now? You said earlier that "It's $60, it's AAA," which is clearly false since we have plenty of non-AAA games that are $60. Furthermore, Deathloop isn't the same caliber of game as Starfield or anywhere near it. Starfield supposedly had a budget of $200M+ and was developed over 8 years. Not the same level of game at all so using Deahtloop as a precedent for Starfield is moronic. They won't drop it as low as fast because it was far more expensive to develop.

What's more, Deahtloop peaked at 20,000 concurrent players on Steam. Starfield peaked at 330,000 and even the early access version which is $100 peaked at 267,000. How the fuck are you going to use Deathloop as a precedent when Starfield boasts almost 17x the number of concurrent players? And Deathloop wasn't even on Game Pass Day 1.

Starfield is $70, not $60 and has a deluxe edition of $100 and has a bunch of DLCs planned. The $100 deluxe version contains one story expansion which will presumably be $30. You're basically telling us the playerbase, even factoring the DLCs and premium versions, will pay 30% on average over the next 4 years, basically not spending 70% of the full potential. That won't happen. Factoring the base game + the additional content, the average player will spend much closer to $50. Unless of course, you think they'll buy the game for $20 on average and add another $10 for DLCs.
You forgot the $300 Constellation Edition, which sold out.

Starfield is doing fine and is making bank. They had over 2 million people playing the game before launch, and that's with Gamestop not even releasing the physical versions of the $35 Game Pass Upgrade, $100 Deluxe Edition and the $300 Constellation Edition until launch day.
 

GoldenEye98

posts news as their odd job
How TF people are still incapable to understand a developer makes a fraction of the full retail price? I don’t even get into revenue vs. net profit.

Steam will get a cut...but where else? Physical sales are a fraction of what they were when people made this argument in the past. So a lot of it is just Microsoft selling it on it's own platform.
 
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Cyberpunkd

Member
Steam will get a cut...but where else? Physical sales are a fraction of what they were when people made this argument in the past. So a lot of it is just Microsoft selling it on it's own platform.
Physical sales are still a significant portion, let’s say at least 30%. Steam cut is also 30% I think.
But MS own Bethesda these days, they get the dev slice and the platform slice.
MS, the article mentions Bethesda. These are still two separate companies with separate budgets, P&Ls, etc.
 
I personally think the entire thing's days are numbered, as I've been saying for years now. Microsoft failed to "disrupt" the industry, they are losing ground to their competitors, and something has to give.
Their solution is to buy the whole industry up and force people to sub or not have any games to play anymore.

That's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see how it works out for them.
 
The refresh Xseries already removes the disc drives, as confirmed by leaks. So no more physical sales

After that, they can just gradually phase out digital sales and make gaming subscription only

This is literally what they did with Office

You can still buy standalone, one time purchase versions of Office.

The rest of that is just the typical GamePass worrier crap we've heard for years, and heard about EA Access for years before that.

Xbox is in no position to erase physical sales from their own ecosystem, let alone the industry LOL
 
P Prevolition
What is your take on the post above?
It made me laugh out loud. A disc-less SKU != no more digital, quite the contrary. Sure physical is slowly getting phased out. But no more digital sales? There's too much money to be made, and there's no way to get all developers and publishers on board with Gamepass to stop digital sales. Also as Bumblebeetuna Bumblebeetuna pointed out, MS still offers a perpetual digital license for Office.
 

tusharngf

Member
I got SKYRIM after 10 years of its launch with DLC for 30 bucks. Same as I did with Fallout 4 which I got recently. The only title I did not buy is Fallout 76 from Bethesda because it's an online-only game. True RPG fans never miss out on games from Bethesda. I have always used mods with their games.
 
The refresh Xseries already removes the disc drives, as confirmed by leaks. So no more physical sales

After that, they can just gradually phase out digital sales and make gaming subscription only

This is literally what they did with Office
No, office can still be purchased separately. We literally went through this in the OT already.
 

mckmas8808

Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
So yeah, they are probably comparing the 10m Starfield number vs. unique players of Fallout 4 (a smaller number than shipped copies) at the same time period. That's fair.

That's not fair at all then. That'll be a terrible comparison.

You forgot the $300 Constellation Edition, which sold out.

Starfield is doing fine and is making bank. They had over 2 million people playing the game before launch, and that's with Gamestop not even releasing the physical versions of the $35 Game Pass Upgrade, $100 Deluxe Edition and the $300 Constellation Edition until launch day.

We all know Starfield will be fine. The question was, will it generate $1 Billion dollars.
 

SEGAvangelist

Gold Member
We all know Starfield will be fine. The question was, will it generate $1 Billion dollars.
Not really. That's not the question at all now since it was a pre-acquisition evaluation. The posters in this thread have built the 1 billion revenue figure to be something MS has set for expectations of sales.
 
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