Xbox Boss Highlights 'Remarkable' Success Of Three Key Franchises At Bethesda

Units sold
Units sold
Hours played 🫠

Edit—incidentally, two of these launched pre-Gamepass, one launched into Gamepass.

I quite liked a lot of Starfield for what it's worth. Absolutely critical of it of course. Really needed bosses and enemies you could use your powers against, repeating bases was lame, and space travel needed a big update. Story was also kind of weak but the side quests were fun. Definitely over hyped but happy we have the universe to build on. I still found the game beautiful, the orchestral score was great, graphics were good given the size of the universe and I really liked shipbuilding. A good foundation for the future hopefully

@Balaam_ Well, "Starfield will soon reach over 1 billion hours played" is easier to say than saying "15 million people paid $15+ per month for several months to rent the game, with some suckers paying an additional $35 just for early access". 😉

So she doesn't mention sales for Starfield, but hours played lol. Yeah, if it sold massive we would have heard the developers shouting it from the rooftops like any dev does on twitter these days.

@Fiendish-Beaver there are quite a lot of bespoke settlements and handcrafted stories within the game. I do enjoy the desolation on some of the planets as the majority out there (in our galaxy) are indeed barren. The physics are great and the planets and day night cycles are on point for their mass relative to the stars they orbit. I do amateur astronomy outside so maybe a reason I like that aspect a bit more than usual. Still plenty to offer on the planets with cities and settlements. I agree maybe they did too much planet generation instead of giving it some TLC, they had to take some shortcuts to hit the sheer size of options though which has affected the quality of randomly generated content for sure

Said it else where really enjoy fallout/ES among my favourite series.

But it’s a little depressing that that is all we are looking at getting in the next 10years from Bethesda

Hours played means nothing compared to units sold

She’s smart.

She knows having big ip and exclusivity is important because it will help Xbox grow.

Don Mattrick inflicted massive damage upon PlayStation by nicking FFXIII and making it multi plat back on Xbox 360.

If Xbox grows in hardware sales, expect Asha Sharma to secure Marvel games on Xbox going forward (whenever that’ll be).

@Kilamanjaro Nice. I also love Starfield for those reasons... and others. The side quest are fun and the dialogues are more natural and credible than in other RPG. The beginning is boring, but it becomes a lot of fun after a while.

@Fiendish-Beaver yeah I took a long pause on it until they're done with it, haven't played it since before they added land vehicles. Should give us both enough time to play it by the time they fully complete ES6 which I'm guessing is done with content in 2031

@Fiendish-Beaver Starfield is a great game that really doesn't deserve the hate it gets which I feel a lot of it is manufactured just because of the console war nonsense. It does somethings better than the fallout games and falls short in other regards. The combat and gunplay is better in Starfield than Fallout for sure. Story and faction quests I thought were very well done. The game, like all Bethesda games, grow over the years but what is there is a full large game with an endgame loop if you you are into that sort of thing.

I'm very surprised she's allowing them to continue with Starfield. It's far from the worst game I've ever played, but I found it even more disappointing than Mass Effect Andromeda. It's missing the charm, the fun, the humor, the sleaze.... pretty much everything that makes a Bethesda game memorable. I put 150+ hours into the game and the only character I can name is Sarah. Can't think of a single memorable line of dialogue. It's so forgettable and mediocre; hard to believe Mommy is letting them do anything more than toss it in a bin.

Starfield will always be a waste of time in my book!
If it walks talks and acts like a waste of time it's probably a waste of time!

@Balaam_ I was coming to comment exactly on this, the difference in metric used is telling

All I want is a new Wolfenstein!

Hours played is utterly meaningless. Imagine standing in front of one's shareholders stating:

"We haven't actually made a profit this quarter, quite the opposite. In fact we foresee mass layoffs as a result. However, lots of people are using the product that we practically gave away so you know, silver lining and all that!"

😂

Of course Sharma and co know it's an absolute nonsense, but its an effective way of pulling the wool over people's eyes, in particular the Xbox faithful who frequent a combination of boards like this one and social media platforms.

It's the flea circus, and Microsoft have gotten pretty damn good at it of late.

Just a FYI, the boss isn't the boss. lol. Asha runs everything through Satya and he gives the final ok. Asha is the face of Xbox, which was very smart on Microsoft's part.

1 billion hours of Starfield? Take away loading screen time and it’s 100,000 😅

@TrollOfWar yeah, those two days of early access are a scam, aren’t they?

Have over 1000 hours in Starfield. Keep it coming, Bethesda!