There’s our Steam Starfield numbers.
Guess
G
Godot25
's estimates were likely correct after all. They said 4 million for Starfield, right? Well, take the revenue there and divide by the average launch MSRP ($60) and you get ~ 3.9 million.
Although it's likely a bit lower than that, since a good number also bought the higher-priced editions. But has the game gone on sale on Steam? I think it definitely has, so that would balance things out the other way. Basically units sold range for Starfield on Steam could be anywhere between 3.8 million - 4.2 million. I think that seems fair.
Sea of Thieves is still in its 5th year and launched in 2018. SoT will hit 6 years in March and it has only been on Steam since 2020.
SoT also had strong retail and digital sales when it launched. Game Pass was still new when SoT released, so Game Pass didn't effect sales that much. SoT was #1 in the UK and #2 in the US on the March 2018 sales charts. Rare also reported SoT launch sales numbers of 2 million, probably the last time MS reported sales numbers on a game, before they went full on MS company line of subscription and engagement numbers, like they do with all their other products. It has been reported several times recently that SoT has sold around 15 million copies.
Launch press release from March 2018:
Sea of Thieves has sold more than 2 million copies across Windows PC and Xbox One, becoming Microsoft's fastest selling new IP on current-gen consoles. "The
stevivor.com
Who's reported that it sold 15 million copies and what source(s) were they using?
Assuming these numbers are true,
- Some are incredible (Sea of Thieves)
- Some are decent (Grounded, Ori)
- Some are downright terrible (Forza, Redfall, MSFS, Gears 5, Psy 2, etc.)
My biggest takeaway from here is that it is the more
recent games that have performed poorly. And that's a big worry, if true.
All of the following games are from the last 4-5 years, and they do not have good sales numbers:
- Gears 5 (682K)
- Forza Motorsport (155K)
- Hi-Fi Rush (668K)
- Minecraft Dungeons (288K)
- Minecraft Legends (72K)
- As Dusk Falls (70K)
- Psychonauts 2 (310K)
- Pentiment (147K)
These 8 games have sold less than 2.4 million copies combined.
I think it's a similar situation with Sony's recent PC releases, in that the numbers look bad when you compare them to what numbers the same games move on the console itself, both in units and revenue, then compare that to the total install base for Steam being around 130+ million accounts. In
THAT context, the numbers are underwhelming...
...except I think with Microsoft, it's more complicated since it's likely Steam is accounting for a majority of their total software sales. I.e if FH5's sold 6+ million on Steam, I doubt it's done another 6 million on Xbox consoles. NPD/Circana rankings would have been better post-release to suggest that to be the case. Same goes for games like Halo Infinite. There's a reason why Microsoft are possibly looking to port these games to other consoles.
Wouldn't be wild to say that Xbox console B2P sales are Microsoft's weakest link in total software B2P sales, even Windows Store is probably contributing better on that front, let alone Steam. And again, we have NPD/Circana rankings, plus sales charts from other countries (UK, Japan, Germany, Spain etc.) and proof that Xbox digital isn't overwhelmingly larger than PlayStation digital when it comes to digital sales splits (absolute terms). Maybe relative to current-gen consoles it is considering how many Series S units are part of total sales base for Series systems, but if even half of PS5's install base are Digital models, that'd eclipse the total number of Series S systems on the market by at
least 10 million.
Although FWIW, I don't think HiFi or Psychonauts 2's numbers for Steam are terrible; HiFi as a whole likely underperformed in units sold but that's more because the Xbox console base didn't go out and buy the game. Meanwhile Psychonauts is a very niche IP and 310K on Steam isn't bad in that context, plus they'd also have PS & Switch sales adding to that. Xbox console sales for the game were probably soft, though.
screenrant.com
