Bethesda Game Studios’ title did not exactly set the world on fire compared with other Xbox-published releases during its launch week.
Starfield finally arrived on PlayStation 5 last week alongside the Free Lanes update and the launch of the Terran Armada DLC. According to Alinea Analytics, the game sold 140,000 copies in its first week on PlayStation. That puts it in an average spot compared with other games released on PlayStation 5 by Xbox Game Studios over the last six months. Against The Outer Worlds 2, Avowed, Ninja Gaiden 4, Age of Empires IV, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, and South of Midnight, BGS’s once highly anticipated space RPG landed squarely in the middle of the pack.
It is worth pointing out that it was not far behind third-place The Outer Worlds 2, and it comfortably outperformed fifth-place Avowed. It is also worth noting that this ranking only covers Xbox-published games and does not include Call of Duty. Even so, the PlayStation 5 version of Starfield had a middling launch. It is still the fastest-selling title on this list when it comes to major first-week sales milestones on the platform. The closest title was Ninja Gaiden 4, which sold just under 100,000 copies over the same period, and the drop after that is even more pronounced.
It still has a long road ahead if it wants to catch up with Xbox’s best-selling games on PS5, such as Forza Horizon 5, which has already sold more than 5.7 million copies on PlayStation 5. Meanwhile, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is reportedly performing on PS5 at roughly the same level as it did on Xbox, which also means it has passed its Steam sales. In the case of Gears of War: Reloaded, the majority of its 1 million units sold across all platforms, around 70%, reportedly came from PlayStation 5 players.
As for the kind of PlayStation 5 players jumping into Starfield right away, it is hardly surprising that they are mostly the same PlayStation users who were already into BGS games. Most of them have already played Fallout 4, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion – Remastered, or all of them. There is also expected to be overlap between PS5 players of The Outer Worlds 2 and Starfield. Another overlap, equally unsurprising but not directly tied to BGS, is between players of No Man’s Sky and those who checked out Starfield when it launched on PlayStation 5.
The signs do suggest, however, that the game is slowly but steadily improving its PlayStation 5 sales, overtaking the other six games used in Alinea Analytics’ comparison.
