I wouldn't be surprised if the recent mod suppression stance of Nexus is having an effect on sales. You go into Bethesda games KNOWING that the base game is just the foundation to install mods to improve your game.
If you can't get the mods you want because they or their creator is 'controversial', what's the fucking point in buying it? You just have a generic, bland rpg to play. The last Bethesda game I could play without mods was Skyrim (as I think Fallout NV came out before) and Fallout 4 NEEDED mods because so many of the mechanics in that game STILL to this day aren't polished. Even after this long, EA managed to turn Battlefield 4 from buggy mess to best game in less time.
I disagree, I don't think the mod suppression has any effect and I say that as a modder that's been cranking away mods since Oblivion. Most people actually prefer or at least play that generic, bland rpg. There was some information and stats from Bethesda a while back that the modding community was the outlier, most people actually played the games vanilla and were okay with that. The console versions of Skyrim for example didn't have any modding capability for 7 years and they still sold millions of copies of it. Ditto with the other games that were released console wise.
Secondly while the Nexus is the default place for mods, there's a lot of community and mod sources outside that. I mean the sex mod community alone is spread over multiple websites and repositories and they've never tamped down on that. The mod suppression might be news worthy to us, but I guarantee anyone off the street looking to purchase Starfield has no clue about it and/or gives zero fucks.
So it's just a shit game that didn't live up to the hype and so isn't retaining a player base?
I mean that makes sense since the one thing that kept people playing Fallout 4 was settlement building, people only did other things to unlock more stuff to build with.
Yeah, even ignoring the woke stuff, the game is absolutely dreadful to watch someone play.
There is NOTHING cinematic or visually engaging about the game.
The gunplay consists of bullet sponge enemies; the dialogue is atrociously dull; and there are no narrative hooks whatsoever for anyone watching.
There's no reason to care about any of the characters or outcomes; literally nothing happens in the game that viewers would care about.
So you're spot-on that Bethesda's own game was likely the biggest anathema for bringing in paying consumers. I skimmed some streams and never once saw anything remotely interesting happening.
its way worse than fallout4 at least there you could explore a connected world, had power armor and vats and more gore and mini nukes and the fallout lore. And the exploration was what carried Bethesda games that just isnt fun with the same few random generated things to do on 1000 planets which are empty. Then every named npc is unkillable so you cant even kill all these annoying ugly abominations they put in the game. Only thing fun was the ship building, but without real space exploration also pointless except for more storage.
Yeah, even ignoring the woke stuff, the game is absolutely dreadful to watch someone play.
I saw a stream on Youtube of a guy playing and he dozed off for a second, in the middle of combat. Starfield is an absolute chore to play and watching it is like having Ben Stein read your local phone book. It's the video game equivalent of trying to OD on Valium.
Yeah the AI is braindead for the most part and the shooting is extremely generic.
You don'\t have to utilise cover, and there are no leaning/peeking mechanics, plus the environments aren't designed for shootouts. So basically you're encouraged just to boost-jump and shoot at enemies ad nauseam. So every shootout basically looks and feels the same, and the guns aren't interesting enough to hold anyone's attention.
Halo: Combat Evolved from 2001 literally has better shooting mechanics and AI than Starfield.
I honestly thought the spaceship travel in starfield was akin to star citizen and no man sky but when i heard they're still running on their old engine, i lost all hope to play since im freaking sure we wont even get driveable land vehicle. Lo and behold when release day came and i watched some gameplay on youtube/twitch, it was loading screen to loading screen and barren planets you are forced to travel on foot.
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.
Look, it's so easy to lie with statistics. I'll call this out when any side does it, and I'll give OP the benefit and say this is unintentional.
Starfield and Cyberpunk are the only singleplayer games in the top thirty as far as playerbase. Falloff is natural, and they're competing with much older games, all multiplayer, which shows what people consistently play. Counter-Strike, DotA, PUBG, Apex Legends, GTA5.
Comparing Starfield to Cyberpunk, both were very hyped up games...falloff is going to happen. It took less than a month for Cyberpunk to reach 10% of initial playercount, Starfield is still around 33%.
I picked a semi 'our guy' game for comparison, Kingdome Come: Deliverance was the first that sprang to mind. It reached 10% of peak in about a month too. The Witcher 3, a fan favorite, lasted like a week longer before hitting 10%.
Like or hate Starfield - and there's plenty of criticism to levy - but it's at the very least doing as expected...arguably better. Playercount will keep falling, but that's to be expected.
Oh, and I didn't even touch on it because it has some multiplayer, but Baldur's Gate 3 blows both out of the water in a big way, retaining 75% of its playerbase after a month, and is still at 30% after almost two months.
If people are going to dunk on any of these games, at least do it for correct reasons, not spinning numbers to represent a narrative that isn't true.
Huh, weird. Not sure how I did that either. I'll leave it, just for you.
I guess it's just one of those things where people throw something else in there somehow. Turrent is another one I see, instead of turret. Not sure where the N comes from, but a bunch of people do it for whatever reason.
Starfield and Cyberpunk are the only singleplayer games in the top thirty as far as playerbase.
Its a classic /v/-type thinking pattern.
Oh this single player game didn't have infinite playercount growth 3 months in. OH NO NO NO/X-sisters what went wrong/I....am....forgotten/SHAZAM
Its actually not just people being dumb. Its the thinking that Devs cultivate to make you think GaaS and other "lifetime updates" are a good thing. You can't just make a game, you need a season pass full of updates and monthly challenges and a plethora of content cut from the base game designed to make you keep coming back.
Its people falling for marketing and then judging other games based on it.
Baldur's Gate 3 blows both out of the water in a big way, retaining 75% of its playerbase after a month, and is still at 30% after almost two months.
To keep on the trend with bad stats, this is still bad stats. BG is a long ass game, which means it'll retain the same players for a long time just trying to finish it, which also has considerable differences in replay as far as my understanding goes with things like Durge.
Not replay to "try a new build" or pick a different background that only has a little flavor text, like most RPGs, but almost a whole new game level in narrative changes and characters. Which compounded with that "long ass game" thing means retention for it specifically is incredibly easy.
Skyrim has 9 cities, starfield only 4. Skyrim has 7 towns, starfield only 4. For skyrim every location has something fun or meaningful that makes exploring worth the time. In starfield, "not all planets are amusement park" so you waste time exploring empty shit. Skyrim NPCs seem colorful and flavorful. Starfield is bland as fuck.
Also.. why the fuck did starfield change how saves are done? Why the fuck new saves start as 1?? Like if i make a mental note " hmm save 8008 is important, i gotta remember it". After i make 50 new saves, save 8008 becomes 8058. Command console isnt very responsive and its laggy/glitchy at times.
Game runs like garbage while looking like a 2016 game even with best hardware that cost 3k usd.
I have 5000 hrs in skyrim and 3000 hrs in fallout 4.. im already over starfield at 100hrs. Im gonna ignore it till cbbe jiggle physics come out and i can have a planet where dark elves in bikini exists and its landscape is one giant Dead or Alive beach pool resort. Not the boring ass resort on porimma.
The fact that small studio Larian is being compared to the other juggernauts is a win on its own. They blew sales expectations out of the water and definitely made money.
I haven't played the game myself and not a "fanboy", but BG3 was objectively successful by every metric, like it or not.
I haven't played the game myself and not a "fanboy", but BG3 was objectively successful by every metric, like it or not.
That's one of the worst things to happen to gaming, because it gives every studio -- and all the woketards -- all the ammo they need to keep pushing woke nonsense.
Normies will also use BG3 as another notch on the Overton Window further moving Left to say "Well, BG3 was a good game. Who cares about the woke stuff? You probably don't even know what woke means!"
I've seen plenty of coomer planktards on the normie YouTube videos defending BG3 as a "great game", and anyone pointing out the woke stuff is usually shouted down by the plankies.
Expect many other studios to follow suit in adding equal amounts of woke-stuff and following Larian's footsteps in adding a lot of (routed) "choices" so people will continue to defend the woke RPGs as they have with BG3.
This is one of the reason i get why its called "slop" cause in their fear to not get "political" a lot of normies will refuse to acknowledge woke crap being masked behind fun aspect or whatever and lap it up like pigs.
Weirdly enough, I have at least two games in my Steam library that are over 5 years old, still being developed, both of which had major releases recently with more to come.
7 Days to Die doesn't count. That game is an absolute freak of nature.
You're always going to find exceptions to the rule, though. And it's telling that neither game are from Triple-A studios.
Ok, so going by the metrics in the graph here it seems to indicate more people were and are playing BG3, even higher than AAA studios on release. How is that not "successful"?
And as a note, BG3 has half the budget of Starfield and again by the graph above, more than 4 times the players at launch.
Not every piece of media is going to be the Mona Lisa or Original Star Wars, but in this case a relatively small studio on a small budget outperformed the AAA studios in this graph. I don't know in what universe that's a failure.
I mean, I'd talk about my recent games more but they aren't ever relevant to the discussion.
Because when is Against the Storm, Book of Demons, or Symphony of War ever going to come up? They don't get controversy bucks or FOMO triggers going, so they just never happen because we don't have consistent video game discussion threads. Just a random one pops up every now and then and its usually buried by outrage farmers.
Shit on your own post I wrote a long screed about Triangle Strategy just a few days ago, a modern AAA game I just went back to and likely will many times over the years. Because for once there was a topic where a non-classic was relevant to the discussion.
You're right about how the falloff works, but should we expect story-driven single-player games to have a constant ongoing player base? I'm sure the devs would love that but they don't expect it. That's always been the market even before the AAA explosion. Studios have to keep making something new or die.
I dont think many will follow, they would need to be able to deliver a similar quality game where you can solve some quests in 5+ different ways. And at least Larian put some attractive women in their game. Doubt the others would do that. And it has the D&D license. A generic game without all that lore and races/classes wouldnt draw many in.
Nah, even if you compare the blue Starfield line with BG3's line at its first wave, it's still the almost exact same downward trend. It's just harder to see because the orange line is higher, but use some image editor and you'll see it's the same.
You're just comparing peak number of the entire week. That's fine, but I don't think it's representative of the whole thing, because it means anything big happening on said week end will impact your number greatly.
At the end of the day, all wokeness aside, Starfield is an ok game with ok game play with the absolute worst progression system I have ever seen. You absolutely have to cheat if you want to progress at a reasonable pace. You can't just level up a skill multiple times, nay nay, you have to finish a dipshit challenge like "kill 50 enemies with a pistol" then level up again before you get to do that.
Not just that, but it's also just plain insulting when it isn't pushing the narrative.
At the end of the game there's an NPC that's supposed to be the player character. You're given the option of asking "who create the artifacts" and the response is unbelievably awful. The answer is "You just answered your own question, the creators create things". It's like Emil ripped off a third grader's book report.
I wouldn't be surprised if the recent mod suppression stance of Nexus is having an effect on sales. You go into Bethesda games KNOWING that the base game is just the foundation to install mods to improve your game.
If you can't get the mods you want because they or their creator is 'controversial', what's the fucking point in buying it? You just have a generic, bland rpg to play. The last Bethesda game I could play without mods was Skyrim (as I think Fallout NV came out before) and Fallout 4 NEEDED mods because so many of the mechanics in that game STILL to this day aren't polished. Even after this long, EA managed to turn Battlefield 4 from buggy mess to best game in less time.
I disagree, I don't think the mod suppression has any effect and I say that as a modder that's been cranking away mods since Oblivion. Most people actually prefer or at least play that generic, bland rpg. There was some information and stats from Bethesda a while back that the modding community was the outlier, most people actually played the games vanilla and were okay with that. The console versions of Skyrim for example didn't have any modding capability for 7 years and they still sold millions of copies of it. Ditto with the other games that were released console wise.
Secondly while the Nexus is the default place for mods, there's a lot of community and mod sources outside that. I mean the sex mod community alone is spread over multiple websites and repositories and they've never tamped down on that. The mod suppression might be news worthy to us, but I guarantee anyone off the street looking to purchase Starfield has no clue about it and/or gives zero fucks.
So it's just a shit game that didn't live up to the hype and so isn't retaining a player base?
I mean that makes sense since the one thing that kept people playing Fallout 4 was settlement building, people only did other things to unlock more stuff to build with.
My tasteless normie friends' most obvious hype killer was watching a bunch of streamers play it and say it's boring as fuck.
Yeah, even ignoring the woke stuff, the game is absolutely dreadful to watch someone play.
There is NOTHING cinematic or visually engaging about the game.
The gunplay consists of bullet sponge enemies; the dialogue is atrociously dull; and there are no narrative hooks whatsoever for anyone watching.
There's no reason to care about any of the characters or outcomes; literally nothing happens in the game that viewers would care about.
So you're spot-on that Bethesda's own game was likely the biggest anathema for bringing in paying consumers. I skimmed some streams and never once saw anything remotely interesting happening.
So it's basically Fallout 4, only blander, somehow.
Whelp. I wish I could say I'm surprise, but that about tracks with what I was expecting.
its way worse than fallout4 at least there you could explore a connected world, had power armor and vats and more gore and mini nukes and the fallout lore. And the exploration was what carried Bethesda games that just isnt fun with the same few random generated things to do on 1000 planets which are empty. Then every named npc is unkillable so you cant even kill all these annoying ugly abominations they put in the game. Only thing fun was the ship building, but without real space exploration also pointless except for more storage.
I saw a stream on Youtube of a guy playing and he dozed off for a second, in the middle of combat. Starfield is an absolute chore to play and watching it is like having Ben Stein read your local phone book. It's the video game equivalent of trying to OD on Valium.
Yeah the AI is braindead for the most part and the shooting is extremely generic.
You don'\t have to utilise cover, and there are no leaning/peeking mechanics, plus the environments aren't designed for shootouts. So basically you're encouraged just to boost-jump and shoot at enemies ad nauseam. So every shootout basically looks and feels the same, and the guns aren't interesting enough to hold anyone's attention.
Halo: Combat Evolved from 2001 literally has better shooting mechanics and AI than Starfield.
I honestly thought the spaceship travel in starfield was akin to star citizen and no man sky but when i heard they're still running on their old engine, i lost all hope to play since im freaking sure we wont even get driveable land vehicle. Lo and behold when release day came and i watched some gameplay on youtube/twitch, it was loading screen to loading screen and barren planets you are forced to travel on foot.
That will be in the $40 VEHICLES AND MECHS DLC.
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.
I was actually enjoying being a space pirate until i gunned down some guy for sassin' me which caused around 15 others to attack.
Imagine my surprise when every fucking one of them just stood back up after the fight.
I realize you can't kill story characters but almost all were guards or random citizens.
I kind of lost interest after that.
It seems you ran afoul of the literal "protected" class.
Look, it's so easy to lie with statistics. I'll call this out when any side does it, and I'll give OP the benefit and say this is unintentional.
Starfield and Cyberpunk are the only singleplayer games in the top thirty as far as playerbase. Falloff is natural, and they're competing with much older games, all multiplayer, which shows what people consistently play. Counter-Strike, DotA, PUBG, Apex Legends, GTA5.
Comparing Starfield to Cyberpunk, both were very hyped up games...falloff is going to happen. It took less than a month for Cyberpunk to reach 10% of initial playercount, Starfield is still around 33%.
I picked a semi 'our guy' game for comparison, Kingdome Come: Deliverance was the first that sprang to mind. It reached 10% of peak in about a month too. The Witcher 3, a fan favorite, lasted like a week longer before hitting 10%.
Like or hate Starfield - and there's plenty of criticism to levy - but it's at the very least doing as expected...arguably better. Playercount will keep falling, but that's to be expected.
Oh, and I didn't even touch on it because it has some multiplayer, but Baldur's Gate 3 blows both out of the water in a big way, retaining 75% of its playerbase after a month, and is still at 30% after almost two months.
If people are going to dunk on any of these games, at least do it for correct reasons, not spinning numbers to represent a narrative that isn't true.
Just happy to see someone else making this typo. I do it all the time and have no idea why.
Huh, weird. Not sure how I did that either. I'll leave it, just for you.
I guess it's just one of those things where people throw something else in there somehow. Turrent is another one I see, instead of turret. Not sure where the N comes from, but a bunch of people do it for whatever reason.
Are you from Seattle by any chance?
Its a classic /v/-type thinking pattern.
Its actually not just people being dumb. Its the thinking that Devs cultivate to make you think GaaS and other "lifetime updates" are a good thing. You can't just make a game, you need a season pass full of updates and monthly challenges and a plethora of content cut from the base game designed to make you keep coming back.
Its people falling for marketing and then judging other games based on it.
To keep on the trend with bad stats, this is still bad stats. BG is a long ass game, which means it'll retain the same players for a long time just trying to finish it, which also has considerable differences in replay as far as my understanding goes with things like Durge.
Not replay to "try a new build" or pick a different background that only has a little flavor text, like most RPGs, but almost a whole new game level in narrative changes and characters. Which compounded with that "long ass game" thing means retention for it specifically is incredibly easy.
Great post. Love it when we keep each other in check whilst still assuming good faith!
Skyrim has 9 cities, starfield only 4. Skyrim has 7 towns, starfield only 4. For skyrim every location has something fun or meaningful that makes exploring worth the time. In starfield, "not all planets are amusement park" so you waste time exploring empty shit. Skyrim NPCs seem colorful and flavorful. Starfield is bland as fuck.
Also.. why the fuck did starfield change how saves are done? Why the fuck new saves start as 1?? Like if i make a mental note " hmm save 8008 is important, i gotta remember it". After i make 50 new saves, save 8008 becomes 8058. Command console isnt very responsive and its laggy/glitchy at times.
Game runs like garbage while looking like a 2016 game even with best hardware that cost 3k usd.
Also dysgenic as fuck. So many of the random NPCs are so ugly they make Oblivion's faces look good and it was done on purpose.
The funny thing is that... the white npcs are not as ugly lol.
I'm not understanding this graph, which games are what color?
OP, can you put up the figures of a more popular recent game by comparison?
Also, which colors represent which games?
Each of the lines is a separate game.
There isn't a legend but from what I remember of seeing player counts I'm pretty confident orange is BG3, green is cyberpunk 2077, blue is Starfield.
I have 5000 hrs in skyrim and 3000 hrs in fallout 4.. im already over starfield at 100hrs. Im gonna ignore it till cbbe jiggle physics come out and i can have a planet where dark elves in bikini exists and its landscape is one giant Dead or Alive beach pool resort. Not the boring ass resort on porimma.
The fact that small studio Larian is being compared to the other juggernauts is a win on its own. They blew sales expectations out of the water and definitely made money.
I haven't played the game myself and not a "fanboy", but BG3 was objectively successful by every metric, like it or not.
That's one of the worst things to happen to gaming, because it gives every studio -- and all the woketards -- all the ammo they need to keep pushing woke nonsense.
Normies will also use BG3 as another notch on the Overton Window further moving Left to say "Well, BG3 was a good game. Who cares about the woke stuff? You probably don't even know what woke means!"
I've seen plenty of coomer planktards on the normie YouTube videos defending BG3 as a "great game", and anyone pointing out the woke stuff is usually shouted down by the plankies.
Expect many other studios to follow suit in adding equal amounts of woke-stuff and following Larian's footsteps in adding a lot of (routed) "choices" so people will continue to defend the woke RPGs as they have with BG3.
This is one of the reason i get why its called "slop" cause in their fear to not get "political" a lot of normies will refuse to acknowledge woke crap being masked behind fun aspect or whatever and lap it up like pigs.
Absolutely agree. OP makes it sound like the game flopped though when it clearly didn't. It's the equivalent of putting your head in the sand.
Weirdly enough, I have at least two games in my Steam library that are over 5 years old, still being developed, both of which had major releases recently with more to come.
7 Days to Die doesn't count. That game is an absolute freak of nature.
You're always going to find exceptions to the rule, though. And it's telling that neither game are from Triple-A studios.
Ok, so going by the metrics in the graph here it seems to indicate more people were and are playing BG3, even higher than AAA studios on release. How is that not "successful"?
And as a note, BG3 has half the budget of Starfield and again by the graph above, more than 4 times the players at launch.
Not every piece of media is going to be the Mona Lisa or Original Star Wars, but in this case a relatively small studio on a small budget outperformed the AAA studios in this graph. I don't know in what universe that's a failure.
I mean, I'd talk about my recent games more but they aren't ever relevant to the discussion.
Because when is Against the Storm, Book of Demons, or Symphony of War ever going to come up? They don't get controversy bucks or FOMO triggers going, so they just never happen because we don't have consistent video game discussion threads. Just a random one pops up every now and then and its usually buried by outrage farmers.
Shit on your own post I wrote a long screed about Triangle Strategy just a few days ago, a modern AAA game I just went back to and likely will many times over the years. Because for once there was a topic where a non-classic was relevant to the discussion.
You're right about how the falloff works, but should we expect story-driven single-player games to have a constant ongoing player base? I'm sure the devs would love that but they don't expect it. That's always been the market even before the AAA explosion. Studios have to keep making something new or die.
I dont think many will follow, they would need to be able to deliver a similar quality game where you can solve some quests in 5+ different ways. And at least Larian put some attractive women in their game. Doubt the others would do that. And it has the D&D license. A generic game without all that lore and races/classes wouldnt draw many in.
Nah, even if you compare the blue Starfield line with BG3's line at its first wave, it's still the almost exact same downward trend. It's just harder to see because the orange line is higher, but use some image editor and you'll see it's the same.
https://steamcharts.com/cmp/1091500,1716740,1086940#3m
BG3 had identical playercounts two weeks after launch.
BG3: 814K Aug 5th, 875K Aug 13th, 813K Aug 19.
Starfailed: 330K Sep 10th, 260K Sep 17th, 187K Sep 24th, and it'll be sub-100K this weekend.
You're just comparing peak number of the entire week. That's fine, but I don't think it's representative of the whole thing, because it means anything big happening on said week end will impact your number greatly.
I cannot get starfield to run without crashing.
At the end of the day, all wokeness aside, Starfield is an ok game with ok game play with the absolute worst progression system I have ever seen. You absolutely have to cheat if you want to progress at a reasonable pace. You can't just level up a skill multiple times, nay nay, you have to finish a dipshit challenge like "kill 50 enemies with a pistol" then level up again before you get to do that.
Starfield is "Console Commands: The Game"
Not just that, but it's also just plain insulting when it isn't pushing the narrative.
At the end of the game there's an NPC that's supposed to be the player character. You're given the option of asking "who create the artifacts" and the response is unbelievably awful. The answer is "You just answered your own question, the creators create things". It's like Emil ripped off a third grader's book report.
So you're saying it's an improvement over his usual writing.