Cyberpunk's playercount came within striking distance of Starfield's before the 2.0 patch even released.
I don't believe for one second that more than a small plurality of PC gamers are using PC gamepass. 98% of the shit on Gamepass is 8-12 year old garbage everyone's already played and will never revisit again. Oh boy, Age of Empires 2!
Starfield has been hyped for years, and Bethesda used to be one of those developers, like Blizzard, where they could sell shit on a shingle to their army of retarded loyalists.
Gamepass is $10/mo. Steam takes 30% of sales. If Starfield doesn't bring new blood to Gamepass, it doesn't make money. Bethesda would need a new player to pay for gamepass for 4 months to match what they'd make selling a full retail copy on Steam.
Starfield had a $210M budget. Marketing is not part of that budget, it's usually handled by the publisher. If we assume Hollywood figures, marketing is half the budget again, so maybe call it $300M all-in.
It's hard to tell how many copies sold on Steam, we only can see timestamp player counts, but I'm going to guess it was under a million copies. Even a million sales, with $42 going to Bethesda for every sale, makes back only 15% of the game's budget. The playercount is now in "one year old indie game" territory swinging between the 40s and 70s.
I don't buy that this has been anything but a financial bomb for them.
It's hard to tell how many copies sold on Steam, we only can see timestamp player counts, but I'm going to guess it was under a million copies.
For some rough estimations, I like to use Steam review count.
BG3 sold 5.2 millions on PC in August, and had at the time about 200 000 reviews. That's about 1 review per 26 sales. It varies quite a bit from game to game (niche games obviously tend to have higher for instance), but I generally use 1 review per 30 or 40 sales.
Starfield has 61536 reviews at this time, so if it has the same player behavior as BG3 (both are still narrative-driven RPGs, so should be fairly close in theory), that's about 1.6m sales. Not a total failure, but for the hype behind it, it feels underwhelming so far.
Gamepass is $10/mo. Steam takes 30% of sales. If Starfield doesn't bring new blood to Gamepass, it doesn't make money. Bethesda would need a new player to pay for gamepass for 4 months to match what they'd make selling a full retail copy on Steam.
I still don't understand the business perspective behind Gamepass. They must be losing tons of potiential money. Many people jumped on Starfield because it's the trend of moment, but next month, they will jump on something else. So for all those people, Starfield only cost 1 month of gamepass at most (and that's assuming they didn't even play anything else in the entire month too, otherwise it will split the money even more). I'm quite afraid of a big company that's willing to lose that much money to be honest, they are prepared to eat the cost for years to make sure gamepass is powerful enough to shape the industry and gain some kind of monopoly in that area, and make sure players don't care anymore about owning games.
Microsoft pays developers so they can put their games on Gamepass, but it’s literally just base games, so you still have to pay for DLC, which Microsoft makes money off of.
Apparently a lot of people use Gamepass as a demo before buying games, and people do end up buying the games that are on Gamepass (Phil Spencer mentioned this ages ago)
Microsoft pays developers so they can put their games on Gamepass, but it’s literally just base games, so you still have to pay for DLC, which Microsoft makes money off of.
Ah good, that means MS will make sure games have has many DLCs as possible. Cause it's not enough already.
Apparently a lot of people use Gamepass as a demo before buying games
The fact that people are willing to pay for a demo is just sad, but very telling how modern gamers.
Devs like the marketing that gamepass gives them.
Free marketing, maybe at the beginning of gameplay, but it won't last long. Reminds me of how everyone rushed to get their games on the Switch cause it was bare-bone in games, and it became over-saturated in an instant with trash games, hopefully MS knows better (same happened with EGS, first their curated games, but now it's free for all).
I don't believe for one second that more than a small plurality of PC gamers are using PC gamepass. 98% of the shit on Gamepass is 8-12 year old garbage everyone's already played and will never revisit again. Oh boy, Age of Empires 2!
I dunno, if I were interested in paying to try Starfield at release, getting the gamepass for a month makes way more sense.
Even if I wanted to own it to replay with mods much later it's still cheaper to blitz the base game in a month on gamepass and buy it for 50% or more off later once there's actually mods worth replaying with.
Starfield has been hyped for years, and Bethesda used to be one of those developers, like Blizzard, where they could sell shit on a shingle to their army of retarded loyalists.
Shit on a shingle is fine food and I don't appreciate you insulting it like that. Bethesda sells the equivalent of literally shitting on a shingle and then they pretend it's the same thing.
Other notes:
Cyberpunk's playercount came within striking distance of Starfield's before the 2.0 patch even released.
I don't believe for one second that more than a small plurality of PC gamers are using PC gamepass. 98% of the shit on Gamepass is 8-12 year old garbage everyone's already played and will never revisit again. Oh boy, Age of Empires 2!
Starfield has been hyped for years, and Bethesda used to be one of those developers, like Blizzard, where they could sell shit on a shingle to their army of retarded loyalists.
Gamepass is $10/mo. Steam takes 30% of sales. If Starfield doesn't bring new blood to Gamepass, it doesn't make money. Bethesda would need a new player to pay for gamepass for 4 months to match what they'd make selling a full retail copy on Steam.
Starfield had a $210M budget. Marketing is not part of that budget, it's usually handled by the publisher. If we assume Hollywood figures, marketing is half the budget again, so maybe call it $300M all-in.
It's hard to tell how many copies sold on Steam, we only can see timestamp player counts, but I'm going to guess it was under a million copies. Even a million sales, with $42 going to Bethesda for every sale, makes back only 15% of the game's budget. The playercount is now in "one year old indie game" territory swinging between the 40s and 70s.
I don't buy that this has been anything but a financial bomb for them.
I AM ABOVE YOUR HUN LIES
This comment is underrated.
For some rough estimations, I like to use Steam review count.
BG3 sold 5.2 millions on PC in August, and had at the time about 200 000 reviews. That's about 1 review per 26 sales. It varies quite a bit from game to game (niche games obviously tend to have higher for instance), but I generally use 1 review per 30 or 40 sales.
Starfield has 61536 reviews at this time, so if it has the same player behavior as BG3 (both are still narrative-driven RPGs, so should be fairly close in theory), that's about 1.6m sales. Not a total failure, but for the hype behind it, it feels underwhelming so far.
I still don't understand the business perspective behind Gamepass. They must be losing tons of potiential money. Many people jumped on Starfield because it's the trend of moment, but next month, they will jump on something else. So for all those people, Starfield only cost 1 month of gamepass at most (and that's assuming they didn't even play anything else in the entire month too, otherwise it will split the money even more). I'm quite afraid of a big company that's willing to lose that much money to be honest, they are prepared to eat the cost for years to make sure gamepass is powerful enough to shape the industry and gain some kind of monopoly in that area, and make sure players don't care anymore about owning games.
On specifically the gamepass point:
Microsoft pays developers so they can put their games on Gamepass, but it’s literally just base games, so you still have to pay for DLC, which Microsoft makes money off of.
Apparently a lot of people use Gamepass as a demo before buying games, and people do end up buying the games that are on Gamepass (Phil Spencer mentioned this ages ago)
Devs like the marketing that gamepass gives them.
Ah good, that means MS will make sure games have has many DLCs as possible. Cause it's not enough already.
The fact that people are willing to pay for a demo is just sad, but very telling how modern gamers.
Free marketing, maybe at the beginning of gameplay, but it won't last long. Reminds me of how everyone rushed to get their games on the Switch cause it was bare-bone in games, and it became over-saturated in an instant with trash games, hopefully MS knows better (same happened with EGS, first their curated games, but now it's free for all).
Wow. How dare you (gretta meme) tarnish the name AOE2! Only game to have a consistent playerbase for over 20 years!
Fuck you I still play tiberium sun with the boys
"Wololo meme.jpg"
I dunno, if I were interested in paying to try Starfield at release, getting the gamepass for a month makes way more sense.
Even if I wanted to own it to replay with mods much later it's still cheaper to blitz the base game in a month on gamepass and buy it for 50% or more off later once there's actually mods worth replaying with.
Shit on a shingle is fine food and I don't appreciate you insulting it like that. Bethesda sells the equivalent of literally shitting on a shingle and then they pretend it's the same thing.