That game, of course, is Starfield, the almost unbelievably vast space exploration title from Bethesda, its first fully new IP in ages joining classic franchises like Fallout and Elder Scrolls.
Sure, there’s no guarantee Starfield will be good or have a smooth launch. But the odds for its quality are in its favor, given the impact the last several Fallout and Elder Scrolls games have had on the industry, and this is not some wild multiplayer MMO experiment like Fallout 76. And it looks like Bethesda’s biggest, most ambitious game ever, by quite a wide margin at that.
This is not some “Xbox is about to blow PlayStation out of the water!!!” post. But I do think this is a situation PlayStation players have not found themselves in often. Not for years, I’d argue. One where they are missing a genuinely massive game that is not availably on their best-selling console.
Microsoft has produced great games, sure. The Forza series is always stellar. Hi-Fi Rush was a surprise hit. Gears has a long history. But in terms of its biggest blockbusters, you have not exactly seen PlayStation fans bemoaning the fact they can’t play Halo Infinite or certainly not uh, Redfall, more recently. This feels like the first time both A) PlayStation fans are genuinely envious of a game coming to Xbox (despite what fanboy wars about framerate and such may say) and B) something does indeed feel like it was taken away from PlayStation as a result of an enormous Microsoft purchase. Even future big games like Fable and Perfect Dark aren’t in that category as Microsoft IPs. And Obsidian’s Avowed isn’t anywhere close to this scale.
It’s like imagining Skyrim, which has sold 60 million copies in 12 years, not coming to PlayStation. Fallout 4 sold 12 million copies in 24 hours back in 2015. Starfield will not put up that level of sales numbers because it’s being offered day one on Xbox Game Pass, though it’s already topping the Steam charts via pre-sale there.
This is the main difference, of course, that Microsoft exclusives are not Xbox exclusives in the traditional sense, as they also come to PC. That certainly is a way for PlayStation players to get their hands on the game in a way that Xbox players cannot grab God of War or Ghost of Tsushima at launch (months, years later, maybe). And yet I do not think we can operate under the assumption that PS4/5 owners all also have the kind of gaming PCs needed to run Starfield effectively. A portion do, I’m sure, but a small portion. And so the point stands with a lot of PS-only players being left out. Then of course there are cloud-based purchases but that tech is still…a bit unproven.
This is, of course, what Microsoft wants. Despite all its talk about opening gaming up to more players, that’s almost always just about their cloud gaming ambitions which can be run on a lot of devices. They very much do want a roster of Xbox exclusive games to rival PlayStation’s well-received, big-selling exclusives. And they only do not want that when it means things like promising they won’t take away Call of Duty from Playstation so their Activision deal can go through. But Starfield? Elder Scrolls VI eventually? Absolutely not. Your “additional places to play” there are PC and the cloud, not PlayStation. Not at all.
PlayStation players can pretend otherwise, but if Starfield comes out and is as big as a Fallout or Elder Scrolls release, it is going to be a huge pain point not to have access to it on their console of choice. There are some workarounds but many won’t be able to employ them, and Microsoft wants this to become the norm, not an exception, as they try to keep pace on the first party front.
