Hard to take your analysis serious when you claim GamePass is more popular on PC than console, or that historically Steam sales are significantly impacted by PC Gamepass.
Cyberpunk 2077 also sold approx 10.2 million copies in slightly over one year on PC alone
And much of this was under a cloud of bad reviews on Steam.
The PC Game Pass thing - a 3:2 ratio between PC subs and console subs - has been well known for a while, not my fault that this is the first time you heard of it.
Regarding Game Pass butchering Steam sales, of course its gonna happen. I mean, if you have north of 15M PC Game Pass subscribers, a lot of those are not going to double dip and pay an additional 70 dollars or more for a game they'd already have access to, unless they're looking to take advantage of the early access but those people are not going to be anywhere near the majority of Starfield's player base. I also bet that people are not going to be double dipping on buying a game they already have access to via sub in a fall/holiday season so packed of hugely anticipated game releases as that of this year.
Regarding the Cyberpunk numbers, you've literally confirmed the point I had stated in my previous comment: that Cyberpunk's PC sales were in the 8-12M units range to date, because only two additional million copies have been sold across all platforms since December 2021 up until March of this year.
Er you realize its been the no.1 most wishlisted game on Steam since the steam page went up a year or two right?, it also was no.1 best global seller for over 8 days when pre-orders went up 3 or 4 months ago. Its going to be massive on Steam.
Also The last data we had for Gamepass numbers was around 10mil subs on Xbox, from around 21mil Series owners. And around 15mil subs on PC, but thats from over 200mil PC players.
Anyway people try and twist it, the game is going to be massive, on PC anyway.
I'm not trying to twist anything, just saying that the "20 million sales in 18 months" simply seems completely unreasonable to me, with Starfield releasing on day one on a subscription service with 25-30M users and on only two platforms, one of which is the least popular of all console ecosystems and has a problem of shrinking game sales in general. I just don't see how the numbers could get there in such a short span of time.
And don't get me wrong, I'm dying to play this game and hoping it'll be the very best it can possibly be. Just search my GAF post history, you'll see that I was one of the few defending this game all the way back to 2019 from the stupid, ignorant claims of it running on the same old Bethesda engine without any significant overhauls and that sort of shit. Hell, I'd been anticipating its release since before it was officially announced, when we only had a trademark for it.
You are going to be surprised.
There are a out 25 million XSXS out there.
You have about 135 million active users on Steam. Bethesda is one of the highest rated PC centric developers out there, so this will easily be one of the biggest selling games on PC.
Diablo 3 sold over 30 million copies on PC alone, and Starfield will have more mass appeal on PC than Diablo does.
While Gamepass will take away some sales for sure, you also have to add those users into the sales equation. There are also a ton of people paying for early access on top of their GP subscription cost.
MS pulls in between 4-5 Billion a year in subscriptions, which is people paying for their games in a different way.
This game is going to make a shit ton of money.
I don't doubt that it is going to be successful, just not to the extent of selling 20 million copies in 18 months and I've already stated my point about it, so I don't think it makes sense to go over and over with this discussion until we have some initial sales figures of the game three weeks from now.