Starfield
Starfield remains one of the strangest video game stories of the year. It was the game the press wrote the most articles about. It was one of the most Googled games of 2023. But it’s been a constant, endless debate. Was it a disappointment, as critic and user reviews suggest? Or was it a breakout hit, with big metrics for Bethesda and a long tail for a single player game with no significant updates?
Both things are true, I think. Starfield reviewed less well than it could have, and there does seem to be an overall sense of underwhelm among many players, some die-hard fans aside. And yet it also seems like it very much was the high-performing, high-engagement hit Xbox wanted to see for its Game Pass arrival.
Starfield has released a whole bunch of stats about the game from this year, most of which are pretty pointless, but a few stand out. One is its 13 million overall players. The second is its forty hours of average playtime per player.
For context, the average playtime for GOTY-sweeper and sprawling RPG Elden Ring was 47 hours. Back in 2012, the average playtime for Skyrim was 72 hours. However, in the broader scope of the entire industry, 40 hours average playtime across 13 million players is wild. That’s 2-4x longer than the entirety of most single player games, and something most developers would kill for.
Yes, you can cue jokes about loading screens or running on planets padding that time, but in reality, for a game to hook players for on average, 40 hours, is nothing short of a big win, indicating that the created sandbox was interesting enough to get players to stick around.
It’s also interesting to view it alongside another number, the “number of Starborn players.” That’s when you (very late spoilers) beat the game, enter the Unity, and come out the other side for a quasi New Game Plus experience. You can do this a lot of times. 1.6 million players did it once. 5.1 million crossings total, so many players did multiple (you can go on forever, really).
That’s technically 12% completion rate. So, while that is kind of low, keep in mind that completion rates across most games aren’t super high. But it’s almost weird to see 12% full getting to the end, but 40 hours average altogether. But these numbers are also skewed by the fact that knowing the Unity works as a New Game Plus and erases almost everything, you can choose to stay and not go through it, living in your original world. So that 12% is lower than the reality because as many players will avoid “beating it” on purpose because of this. If you looked at how many people started New Game Plus in other games, that would be much lower than actual completion rates.
Starfield has just announced a number of 2024 plans, including city maps, new ship parts, new traveling mechanisms and its big expansion, Shattered Space. It does seem unlikely it will ever reach the highs of some of Bethesda’s past games, but again, the numbers are here that indicate this is a solid hit, even if the “discourse” online here would indicate otherwise.
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