There has been a lot of talk about Starfield, and Bethesda in general, after its launch last September.
Under 5,000 players on average
Actually, we have to rewind to Fallout 76 to see the cracks in the studio after the giga successes of the Elder Scrolls series and especially Skyrim (2011,) a game with magic they have not been able to recreate. Fallout has brand success (so great that Fallout 5 is rumored to be accelerated in an industry that “only” delays), but when Bethesda launched a new version with higher resolution and FPS on consoles and support for ultra-wide PC screens , there were many more glaring errors for such an old game that didn’t get so major improvements.
Back to Starfield: the game launched with a gigantic amount of players: 330,597 concurrent players at launch. After that? To put it mildly; it’s not going so well. Over the last 30 days, the number of average players is 4827. We have to go back to December 2023 to see over 10,000 players, certainly approaching 12,822 on average in the winter month.
Won’t arrive until autumn
So what can Bethesda do? There’s really nothing left to do but continue to fix bugs and optimize the experience in every possible way and offer more content, and that’s what the “Shattered Space” DLC will do, but not until this fall. Todd Howard, head of Bethesda, did not reveal anything about the content, but the expansion will be free in an effort to bring to life, or create if you will, an active community around the game that took over 7 years to develop. We expect to find out more about the expansion at the “Xbox Game Showcase” in early June.
Fortunately, the remaining players don’t have to wait until the fall, because a “major update is coming very soon.” The update is related to building ships – whether the world opens up more and with far fewer loading screens, we don’t know, but there is great hope in the long run. The question is whether it is technically possible with the version of Creation Engine 2 the game is built with.
