apparently this is in response to a few threads on Reddit flaming Starfield—in general, it’s been rather interesting to see Bethesda take what i can only describe as a “try to debate Starfield to popularity” approach with the game’s skeptics in the past month or two. not entirely sure it’s a winning strategy, personally.
I genuinely wonder how much it matters though. From online discussions you’ll see that Baldur’s Gate 3 is beloved by fans and held up as a benchmark for community engagement and listening to player feedback. It won GotY, had a launch far beyond anything the devs expected, and got incredible rave reviews.
But if you look at the top 20 best-selling games of the year, Starfield is #10 despite a lukewarm reception, numerous issues, and being accessible via Xbox Gamepass, while BG3 isn’t even on the list.
I think it really brings into perspective just how small a minority the people who post online about these things are, regardless of platform. Maybe the Gamers don’t know jack about your job, or maybe all their criticisms are 100% right. If it sells millions of copies either way, who cares?
The occasional salty dev, I guess
Dunno if this is the case for wherever you got your sales figures from, but a lot of the places that track best-selling games only track physical releases. Or they might also track digital releases if the publisher provides them to whoever is doing that tracking, but they often don’t. BG3 does not have a physical release (yet).
And a quick google seems to back that up. According to Phil Spencer the other day, Starfield has had “over 12 million players”. I’m assuming this is a combined figure of sales and people who downloaded it through game pass. So, less than 12 million copies sold, and probably a good deal under that cuz I assume game pass would be a pretty decent chunk of those players reached. If the top result when googling is accurate, BG3 has sold 22+ million copies. Prolly enough to crack that top 20, I’d guess.
I would not trust that number. Larian just put out an infographic only days ago saying that 1.3M people completed the game. Using achievement data, we can extrapolate that out to somewhere between 7M and 8M copies sold.
The actual developers aren’t seeing any of that money, they’re getting laid off.
That’s the difference between art and just a product. Starfield is just a consumer product. It sold because of heavy marketing.
If you hold up sales as a measure of success, you deserve every possible criticism.
I mean, Call of Duty: Another One is one of the best selling games of the year, despite even casuals lambasting it online. I think devs want to feel like they’re making something people want to play though, rather than feeling like they’re shovelling out garbage for the hogs.
Yeah the developers are themselves just workers that don’t profit no matter how well the game sells. Some might incidentally hold some shares in the company they work for but it’s not big money. They aren’t the board and they aren’t the primary shareholders.
People like being known for having a hand in the Big Game of the Decade. People who worked on Skyrim have that as part of their resume and can point at it and gloat about this crazy thing that is beloved by many.
Conversely an attack on a game they had a hand in developing feels like an attack on their own capabilities — whether or not that has anything to do with it directly.
And BG3 has some pretty gnarly performance issues.
Has the big patch made it better? I haven’t been able to try it out yet.
I’ve only played a little since the new patch but it seems a bit better but my (very mid) PC still struggles performance-wise.