this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2024
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Starfield has lost 97% of its Steam players in less than six months (archive.is)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 22 points 10 months ago

I guess “lately” is relative considering that Fallout 76 has been out for awhile and had a disaster of a launch.

I say this as someone who is a huge Skyrim and fallout fan, but people need to realize that Bethesda might be dead soon and be absorbed into Microsoft.

Let me help wake you up to why. First, their games are developed incredibly slowly. This is showcased by Starfield really well. That game took 7 or 8 years to make and yet, it’s very unfinished. They cannot make games quickly. And clearly they’re being forced to. Fans will wait a long time, but when your franchise gives each generation one game to play, your goose is cooking. Not to mention the glacial pace means that Starfield screwed them big time.

This part is huge though: their tools are ancient and always have been. I know engines get reworked to fit new projects, it’s common in development. However, they haven’t invested at all in their engine and it shows big time. People were even saying it about FO4 how it ran very very poorly and couldn’t handle the cities at release. Everything in that engine was very similar to Skyrim so of course Starfield failed because it’s the same engine with little time spent upgrading it properly. In fact, that’s why the game sucks. They spent too much time on engine stuff and the project moved forward without content due to technical limitations.

Then all the minor stuff. Their PR sucks. FO76 was a scam and still has a subscription to it. Horse armor. Re-releasing games 3 times.

But that’s just the game studio. What about the publishing arm? Well, mostly fine except for Redfall. Seems the only thing they can manage sorta well is the Doom franchise. But my god what happened to Prey and why not have Prey 2?

In summary, Bethesda doesn’t appear to have it in them despite being a huge studio and I’m not looking forward to its future handling of TES6