1 million in over a month is a serious rate decrease.
We'll see if there is any nominal uptick through the holidays, but my guess is that the Xbox series is a dead platform after January 1.
There seems to be continued obfuscation around how well Starfield performed, but I think MOST of us measure the goals around Starfield (enough to foreclose it on PS5) to be as follows:
- Sell Xbox Series Consoles
- Sell GamePass Subscriptions
- Retain MAU beyond 3 months
We've seen in every reported region in the world that Starfield failed to move Xbox Series passed the PS5 with no major release for even the month of September. That is enough to suggest that it didn't sell a sufficient number of units because I don't really think anyone would say the PS5 sold an exceptional number of units in September and by all reports it comfortable outsold the Xbox Series.
With Spider-Man 2, the PS5 Slim, and new accessories, the PS5 is going to have an extremely strong holiday season while the Xbox has nothing to push it this holiday. I'm stunned that Microsoft hasn't dropped the price yet, because that's the only thing left in their control to do. They should immediately drop the price by 100 dollars for the XSX and 50 dollars for the XSS. That they haven't dropped the price tells me that don't want to to eat the operating cost for selling at a loss even if it means maintaining market share. That tells me they are no longer interested in market share this generation, and that's a VERY dangerous conclusion to make this early in the cycle that will reverberate into the next cycle.
Not sure we've seen any reason to believe that GamePass subscribership would have largely advanced due to this game. Forza 5 seemingly got significantly more players though perhaps less engagement. Even if 75% of players played it on GamePass, that would still only be 8.25 million. Let's be aggressive and say half of these are new subscribers, that would mean Starfield only drove 4.125 million subscribers... that's not sufficient, particularly because there is no guarantee that they'll stay beyond 3 months, especially with nothing of note on the horizon.
The player counts for Starfield on in serious decline on Steam. Even Xbox players have moved on to other games falling behind games like Stray...
Perplexed by people who are saying this game wasn't a failure, when it clearly is.