1 billion USD ?

[Athmet]

https://insider-gaming.com/bethesda-expected-to-make-almost-1-billion-on-starfield/

As of publishing, Starfield has seen over 10 million players explore space. Based on that, it seems likely that Bethesda will hit those revenue expectations. Even if only half of the 10 million players purchased the base $70 version of the game, that’s still $350,000,000. With post-launch support and accounting for the deluxe editions of the game, it could be safe to assume the company will have no problem hitting the projects.

[Berserk Slayer]

Originally posted by AdahnGorion:

Originally posted by Athmet:

https://insider-gaming.com/bethesda-expected-to-make-almost-1-billion-on-starfield/

The entire premise is wrong.

Why?

A lot of copies that were bought on steam (a minority, maybe 1-2 million) is not sold as 70 or higher, they were sold much much cheaper due to regional pricing and keys.
Steam takes a cup of the price as well and then factor in taxes.

The game had a development cost of atleast 200 million (some speculate higher, but we go with the lowest) and the game keeps adding cost after release, due to the work still done on it.


So the math showcased here, just tells us that the person don´t know anything about math and business economy at all.. like.. its something a 2nd grader would come up with (logic wise)


If we went on the crazy journey and said 5 million (its unrealistic, since most of the players were playing it for free on xbox gamepass and a lot of rentals on PC game pass as well)
We would still have to find a median price. In Turkey the price is 30 euro ie. in China it is 38 euro, in south east asia (the rest of the region) it is under 40.

The price fluctuates from 30-82 euro.. if we look up actual sales numbers, median is around 45 euro. So 31,5 Euro

This will be a fun read for you as well
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/finance/taxfaq

Hi. Some thoughts:

1. FYI the projected revenue amount does not include:
- tax
- development costs
- publisher (eg Steam) cut of revenue
and nobody reading it should expect it to. Nobody's getting it wrong by excluding any of this stuff, it's a misunderstanding on your part. No judgment, easy mistake to make.


2. I agree with you that their way of simply cutting the 10,000,000 players between $0 and $70 is not a great way to arrive at a figure you would trust. Their conclusion is probably about right, but broken clocks and all that. It's certainly a much smaller error than including development costs and steam cut in revenue, to be fair.


3. When the original 6,000,000 player count figure was released people said it was all game pass but gamesindustry.biz (which various publishers and devs allow to see sales data) confirmed it was approximately 40% game pass and 60% owners. Not all owners have paid the same amount of money, or course, but that puts XBox licensed copies alone at around 4 million even then, so 5 million now would not be a crazy amount, if anything it would be a very unlikely small amount because even if you take "around 4 million" to mean 3.5, add Steam sales and any purchases since and you're past 5 million already.

[Mooman]

Starfield was never about Bethesda but Microsoft playing the long game. Some of this stuff has been mentioned in this thread.

You have to go back to the ZeniMax acquisition. Microsoft bought ZeniMax and hence Bethesda purely to keep Bethesda games off PlayStation. They were worried BGS was starting to have too many exclusives.

So they attempted to screw over PS by making BGS titles Xbox exclusive, to the surprise of BGS (emails as part of FTC trial).

The goal is to sell Xbox hardware and GamePass subscriptions. It sort of worked as there is evidence of a 1000% increase in Xboxes (Amazon sales) but not the corresponding game sales that suggests GamePass subscriptions instead.

Once someone is in the hardware and subscription gravity you've "got 'em" and their loyalty. That has been Microsofts game plan all along, particularly in Asian markets.

Whether SF is successful or not is irrelevant to the longer game at play, that is if MS even stick to it (FTC leaks and hints of leaving gaming if not successful by 2027).

[MugHug]

Originally posted by Mooman:

Starfield was never about Bethesda but Microsoft playing the long game. Some of this stuff has been mentioned in this thread.

You have to go back to the ZeniMax acquisition. Microsoft bought ZeniMax and hence Bethesda purely to keep Bethesda games off PlayStation. They were worried BGS was starting to have too many exclusives.

So they attempted to screw over PS by making BGS titles Xbox exclusive, to the surprise of BGS (emails as part of FTC trial).

The goal is to sell Xbox hardware and GamePass subscriptions. It sort of worked as there is evidence of a 1000% increase in Xboxes (Amazon sales) but not the corresponding game sales that suggests GamePass subscriptions instead.

Once someone is in the hardware and subscription gravity you've "got 'em" and their loyalty. That has been Microsofts game plan all along, particularly in Asian markets.

Whether SF is successful or not is irrelevant to the longer game at play, that is if MS even stick to it (FTC leaks and hints of leaving gaming if not successful by 2027).

Does not add up.

Are you saying Bethesda would not benefit from milking Starfield for the next 10 years? Not like they release a major franchise every year.

Why do you think Microsoft purchased Bethesda, including Bethesda Game Studios? To get a big name franchise that would last as long as Halo did and there is the revered developer Bethesda working on Starfield, a spirited successor to Skyrim that they promote as the next best thing to sliced bread.

Apart from a mobile game, Bethesda's last big release was 5 years ago and then three expansions for it. Todd looks at SF as a active money maker in a similar lifespan or even longer.

So what was Bethesda's life expectancy for SF that you understand and do you have a link to such information?

[PC Panda]

Originally posted by MugHug:

Originally posted by AdahnGorion:

Normally with AAA games, the marketing budget is included with the development cost.
That might be the reason, that number fluctuate from 200 millions to 500 millions

When I heard about it, I did some searching and it does seem that numbers of total development/marketing could indeed be as high at approx. $500 million.

If Cyperpunk 2077's development costs were approx. $174 million and the rest of the approx. $350 million was marketing, then it seems reasonable that Bethesda spend up to $500 million.

Marketing is atleast 1x production cost, in most cases now because of the costs with online marketing it can easily be 1.5x-2x the production cost

[Groogo]

Starfield is making plenty of money.

[ULTRA]

Originally posted by DuX1112:

They projected $600M in Y1, and they're at $147M in WEEK 2. Basically, they hit 1/4 of their goal in 1/24th of the time - moving 6X faster than expected. And that is from PC sales ALONE. Not counting the Xbox revenue etc.

WOWEE! $150M every two weeks!! By my calculations, they'll pass $1B by New Year!!!!!!1!

[PC Panda]

Originally posted by ULTRA:

Originally posted by DuX1112:

They projected $600M in Y1, and they're at $147M in WEEK 2. Basically, they hit 1/4 of their goal in 1/24th of the time - moving 6X faster than expected. And that is from PC sales ALONE. Not counting the Xbox revenue etc.

WOWEE! $150M every two weeks!! By my calculations, they'll pass $1B by New Year!!!!!!1!

This is sarcasm right lol do people just chose to see what they want to

[PC Panda]

Originally posted by Groogo:

Starfield is making plenty of money.

Starfield has indeed made some amount of gross revenue that is a factual statement

[Lu5ck]

Originally posted by DuX1112:

Originally posted by YeenBean:

I'm not going to try and explain that different people have different knowledge bases than you, lol, but... *sigh* I'll try to explain this basic concept as best as I can:

When companies spend 8 years making a product to sell, and they make a $50 million profit off a $200 million investment, they don't think "Yay! We made $50 million!" They think "We should've made $400 million. Who are we going to fire?" I'm.. not SUPER confident you can understand the concept of "opportunity cost", but that's what I just explained to you, so I'd recommend you look it up.

OK, time for you to actually read the stuff you're commenting on. From the article:

According to documents leaked as part of the major Xbox leak last week, Bethesda expected to make almost $1 Billion in revenue on Starfield alone.

That estimate comes over a four-year span.

In year one, the company projected $600 Million followed by $215 Million in year two. Years three and four see the numbers fall a bit as the game’s lifecycle moves on with projections of $50 million and $35 million, respectively.

They projected $600M in Y1, and they're at $147M in WEEK 2. Basically, they hit 1/4 of their goal in 1/24th of the time - moving 6X faster than expected. And that is from PC sales ALONE. Not counting the Xbox revenue etc.

So they're not even right on target, they're exceeding it.

https://insider-gaming.com/bethesda-expected-to-make-almost-1-billion-on-starfield/

The problem is that so many people just WANT to see this game fail, to the point it's really clouding their judgment.

That isn't the point here. The article clearly made a wild estimate that half of the 10m sold are at retail price. It is a baseless estimation, a complete wild guess with no other measurement to back it up. If such a guess is reasonable, I can say all 10m are sold at retail price too.

Furthermore, Bethesa projection is based on their past project like Skyrim. Skyrim sold a lot of copies over the course of a decade, that is only possible because of the modding community. Bethesa is betting on the modding community to make Skyfield a "forever game" so people would keep buying Skyfield over the course of a decade.

However, such projection too is a wild guess because it is heavily dependent on the modding capability, how well the product is received and how big the modding community will be. At this moment, there is already backlash on Nexus, the primary distribution of Bethesa mods over removal of certain mods, that alone already cause a big let down to some modders.

For comparison, Fallout 4 with so much mods only sold over 20m to date. It is done so without any partnership. However, this time Bethesda partnered and distributed Starfield via other distributors while getting way less cut.

[onewhofound]

Originally posted by DuX1112:

Originally posted by onewhofound:

Eesh, IS it good for Bethesda even? I didn't play Skyrim at release so maybe it isn't a fair comparison but there are just so many systems in Starfield that are just trash. So many choices where there have been examples of how to do it from other games, and they picked the worse thing.

I just can't take people seriously when they exaggerate things like this. "So many systems are just trash." Really now? What systems are "just trash"?

And what are these "other games"? Should Bethesda copy game mechanics from Ubisoft or some ♥♥♥♥?

If those systems are better, certainly.

The ship design system is trash. Not only are there only a few functional blocks (meaning 80% of them will never be used), trying to figure out what you are actually putting in your ship at any given time is an exercise all in itself.

The space combat system is trash. Not just the hand-holding auto-aim either. Why would you not include a radar system? X-Wing figured out how to do that in 1993.

The ground combat is trash. It's boring and too easy even on the hardest setting with nothing to differentiate it from any 3rd-rate shooter since Goldeneye.

It's fine to like things that are bad, just don't try to convince other people that Star Wars is good.

[O5]

You’d be able to buy a lot of doujinshi with that kind of money

[Bored Peon]

Originally posted by DuX1112:

The problem is that so many people just WANT to see this game fail, to the point it's really clouding their judgment.

The doomsayers have been doing this for years...
- Skyrim (butthurt people over horse armor in Oblivion)
- Fallout 4 Creation Club
- Fallout 76
Starfield is just the next target.

Meanwhile none of these doomsayers ever mention the actual failures, like the Skyrim arena thingy on the Android phones.

Anyone with common sense and knows how long Bethesda games are around takes one look at the data you provided and know you are right. Especially when you factor in the first DLC is $30 and they have not even offered a Season Pass yet. It does not matter how much data you feed these people they will never admit they are wrong. They will just sit back and call you fanboy or make rude sexual comments because they have no evidence to prove their point.

The things you neglected in your posts was the "I will buy it in X months after the bugs are fixed" group and the "I have it from Gamepass" who will have to buy it if they want to run mods.

[PawgaliciouS QueeN]

Originally posted by Athmet:

https://insider-gaming.com/bethesda-expected-to-make-almost-1-billion-on-starfield/

As of publishing, Starfield has seen over 10 million players explore space. Based on that, it seems likely that Bethesda will hit those revenue expectations. Even if only half of the 10 million players purchased the base $70 version of the game, that’s still $350,000,000. With post-launch support and accounting for the deluxe editions of the game, it could be safe to assume the company will have no problem hitting the projects.

Except publishers only get a fraction of that 70 bucks.