According to newly released estimates, Starfield may not have had the strongest opening sales on PS5.
Bethesda's sci-fi RPG released just last week on the 7th April, and for a while ahead of launch, it was ranking very highly on PS Store pre-order lists — and even topped them at one point.
But initial estimates frame the port as a bit of a misfire. Alinea Analytics reckons Starfield has sold around 140,000 copies on Sony's console, which is a rather lukewarm figure — but there are caveats to this particular story.
For one, Alinea Analytics' guesstimates have been scrutinised as being hit or miss.
Earlier this year, it tagged Resident Evil Requiem’s biggest platform as Steam, which was later contradicted by official US sales data.
However, its sales predictions for Marathon have been corroborated as being in roughly the right ballpark by a Bungie source.
The firm clearly has some kind of insight into the sales of games across all platforms, then, but its methodology remains vague.
This isn't, for example, based on the same kind of hard data that we get from a company like Circana, which tracks actual sales at a retail level.
And so you've got to take these estimates with a grain of salt, even though they can give us perspective on certain sales trends. For instance, if the estimates are off, but only by a relatively small margin, then they can still be seen as valuable data from a purely comparative viewpoint.
For reference, the report places Starfield's PS5 debut behind three other Xbox-published ports: The Outer Worlds 2, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, and Ninja Gaiden 4.
However, it's worth noting that this chart is counting lifetime sales estimates for those games, whereas Starfield's only been out for a week.
And of course, Starfield has arrived on PlayStation over two years after its Xbox and PC release, which puts it at an immediate disadvantage when compared to The Outer Worlds 2 and Ninja Gaiden 4. We'd also argue that the latter isn't really perceived as an Xbox Studios title by most onlookers.
Starfield has apparently done quite a bit better than Avowed, but even then, we're talking an extra 90,000 sales or so — and Bethesda's latest clearly had a much bigger marketing budget.
In terms of trends, these estimates seem to add up — at least to an extent — although they do paint a fairly concerning picture of Xbox's multiplatform push. The truth is that without any official figures to contradict any of this, estimates like these are difficult to completely ignore.
And this is part of the problem. Because Starfield initially launched straight onto Game Pass, we don't actually have concrete sales numbers.
All we know is that it became the Xbox Series' "most-played" game ever when it dropped, and that it had accumulated over 6 million players at launch.
It also landed in an eyebrow-raising 11th place on the overall 2023 US sales charts, suggesting that a lot of people gave it a shot through Game Pass, as opposed to buying it standalone.
So Starfield was clearly popular upon release, but it's fair to say that middling player impressions did lasting damage to the title's reputation.
It never became the landmark release that Bethesda wanted it to be, and that ongoing negativity would have almost certainly made potential PS5 buyers err on the side of caution.
It'll be worth keeping an eye out for Bethesda's own player numbers, then, which could provide some valuable context. But until we get those, this report is going to carry some weight — accurate estimates or not.
How do you think Starfield has done on PS5? Keep waiting for that crashing fix in the comments section below.