Bethesda’s sprawling space role-playing game Starfield has sold an estimated 140,000 copies on PlayStation 5 in its first week on the platform, according to data from games industry analyst firm Alinea Analytics. The PS5 version of Starfield generated approximately $7.7 million in gross revenue from those 140,000 copies sold in one week. While these would be decent numbers for many ports, they are considered less than impressive for a port of the biggest Bethesda role-playing game in a decade. The game arrived on PS5 alongside its most substantial update to date, the Free Lanes patch, which finally allows players to fly manually between planets, as well as the Terran Armada downloadable content expansion.
When placed alongside other Xbox Game Studios titles that have launched on PS5 in the past six months, Starfield lands squarely in the middle. Compared to The Outer Worlds 2, Avowed, Ninja Gaiden 4, Age of Empires 4, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, and South of Midnight, Starfield’s debut sits in the middle of the pack. However, the picture looks somewhat better when sales velocity is taken into account rather than cumulative totals. When data is aligned to each game’s launch date, Starfield has actually sold the fastest of any Xbox-to-PlayStation port in the past six months, with its closest competitor being Ninja Gaiden 4 at barely 100,000 copies six days after launch compared to Starfield’s 140,000, and the gap widens further when compared to The Outer Worlds 2 and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, which stood at 63,000 and 77,000 respectively at the same stage.
The delayed PS5 release has drawn renewed scrutiny over Microsoft’s strategy of timed exclusivity for major first-party titles. The results signal that a 2.5-year delay for these ports to PS5 can seriously limit sales compared to going multiplatform at launch or even six months after. The situation is further complicated by Game Pass, Microsoft’s subscription service. Approximately 8 million people have accessed Starfield via Microsoft’s subscription service, and while Microsoft had touted Starfield as a record-breaker for day-one subscriber additions at the time of its original launch, the long-term commercial math has not played out favourably. On PC, however, the PS5 launch did provide a boost. Since Starfield’s PS5 launch and the Free Lanes update on April 7, the Steam version of Starfield also sold an additional 55,000 copies, generating $2.3 million in revenue, pushing Starfield’s total Steam revenue past the $200 million milestone. The game had already moved 3.7 million copies on Steam before the PS5 port arrived, and even the Xbox version sold over 1 million copies despite Game Pass eating into potential sales. The PS5 launch is expected to push the game’s overall sales past the 5 million copies milestone, though analysts suggest it may take longer than Bethesda and Microsoft had anticipated.
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