Bethesda is Expecting More Players at Launch for Starfield Than Any Previous Game – Todd Howard

The launch of a new Bethesda Game Studios title is nothing short of an event, and each new title tends to attract the masses in startling numbers. The studio’s long-awaited sci-fi RPG Starfield has launched today after years of anticipation, and it seems Bethesda is expecting it to pull in an even bigger crowd upon release than any of its previous titles have.

That’s as per director Todd Howard, who revealed the same in a recent interview with the BBC. Speaking about Starfield’s Xbox exclusivity, Howard said that the game has benefited from Bethesda Game Studios being able to focus on fewer platforms – something that he’s mentioned a few times in the past – and added that in spite of its Xbox exclusivity, he’s told the sci-fi RPG is expected to see more players at launch than any of the studio’s previous titles.

“When you’re making something exclusive then the more you can focus,” Howard said on the topic of Starfield’s Xbox exclusivity. “You know this is the hardware or the thing people are playing on, so the ability to focus on that always yields a better product. You do want people to be able to access it of course. But being with Xbox means there is an ease of access for us, and I’m told we’re expecting more people playing this [at] launch than anything we’ve ever done before, and that’s despite the success of our previous games.”

There’s little doubt in anyone’s mind that Starfield is going to be a massively successful game, much like BGS’ past titles have been – after all, it is estimated to have already seen over 2 million players just from its Premium Edition early access period – though surpassing the launch numbers of previous Fallout and The Elder Scrolls titles would, nonetheless, be a surprising accomplishment for a game that isn’t a multiplayer release.

For context, upon its launch in 2015 for PC, Xbox One, and PS4, Fallout 4 shipped over 12 million copies worldwide on day one. That’s what Starfield is apparently expected to surpass, so it’s certainly a tall order.

The game’s certainly good enough to warrant that kind of success. In our review, we awarded it a score of 10/10, saying, “As unfathomably vast and boundless as the subject matter it covers, Starfield raises the bar for its genre and for the medium as a whole in countless ways – much like the best of its Bethesda-developed forebears did in their time.” Read the full review through here.

Starfield is available now on Xbox Series X/S and PC.