It has been a year to the day since Starfield was released on Xbox and PC, taking the world by storm but landing a relatively mixed reception after a few days in the open. It was in development for a staggering amount of time, and when it finally hit the market, it wavered in its ability to live up to the hype.
The game is now one year old, and the first major expansion for the title – Shattered Space – will be released at the end of the month. With that in mind, it’s a critical time to take a look at the game’s performance and determine if anyone is still playing Starfield.
Lost In The Stars
At first blush, Starfield looks impressive. It offers a vast universe bursting at the seams with opportunities to explore, along with an immersive, lengthy story, plenty of side quests, factions, and intuitive, innovative ship-crafting mechanics. One of the key selling points of Starfield was that the story unravels in a way that technically gives it infinite replay value.
But once you start digging, you find a plethora of copied and pasted content, baseless side missions, forgettable factions and bosses, and a gameplay ‘reset loop’ that quickly becomes stale and repetitive.
In the months that followed Starfield’s release, Bethesda Game Studios became slow to release any new content for the game. Even minor updates were spread out across a gap-laden cadence, and it has taken an entire year for the team to ship Shattered Space, an expansion that was marketed before Starfield was released.
With that being said, is there much of a market ready to receive Shattered Space, or has everyone long since moved on?
Mixed Numbers
Using Steam as a representative example of Starfield’s player count, it looks as though the game isn’t faring too badly. It had 7,311 players in the game at the time of writing, which isn’t awful for a single-player game a year after it was released.
But Baldur’s Gate 3, which was released a month before Starfield, has 68,586.
Elden Ring, which was boosted by the June release of Shadow of the Erdtree, has 57,600.
Fallout 4, which was released in 2014 by Bethesda Game Studios, has 16,180 players exploring a post-apocalyptic wasteland – ten years after launch.
It’s important to stress that many players will still be locked in on Xbox Series X|S, but it’s near impossible to get those numbers.
If we look at the sentiment around streaming, we can see that, at the time of publishing, Starfield had just 62 live viewers on Twitch. That’s down from an all-time high of 522,021. By comparison, Fallout 4 had around 2,000 live viewers. If we look at some space-faring competitors to Starfield, we can see that they’re all doing better than Bethesda’s title:
- Elite: Dangerous – 184
- No Man’s Sky – 517
- Star Citizen – 4,705
According to Google, the search volume for Starfield bottomed out at the start of 2024 and has never picked back up again.
Related: Everything Starfield Borrows From Fallout
The DLC Outlook
Shattered Space could do something to revive Starfield, but I doubt it’ll be anything major. In recent trailers, Bethesda Game Studios made it more of a priority to showcase the arrival of an in-game vehicle than it did the impending release of Shattered Space. Players were excited for a faster way to get across the game’s many planets – but Shattered Space isn’t turning heads.
Historically, Bethesda Game Studios’ DLC game has been sublime, especially in Skyrim and Fallout 3, way back in the day. Fallout 4 had some solid expansions, and Fallout 76 has been getting better for almost six years. But I’m just not feeling the same level of excitement from the community for Starfield’s Shattered Space expansion.
Those other games had expansions released faster than this, so perhaps that’s a problem.
Let’s not forget that Todd Howard wants annual Starfield expansions, but that’s only going to work if there’s a player base there to receive them. Also, Phil Spencer said he wants Starfield to be as popular as Skyrim is 12 years after launch. Will that be a reality a decade from now if it’s not even true today?
I’m willing to give Shattered Space a run, even if I completed Starfield and then never looked back. I can’t imagine it’ll do much to bring many players back into the fold, but it should be entertaining for a few hours at least, and given that I bought the Constellation Edition, I want to get the most from my money.
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