Starfield, Bethesda’s role-playing game set in sci-fi universe, is a game many were looking forward to back in 2023. It had been more than a decade in development, and offered a vast universe with over 1,000 planets for players to explore. It received good reviews at launch back in September 2023, even if it clearly did not quite reach the heights of Bethesda’s all-time classic Skyrim.
Also, the game had the usual Bethesda glitches and bugs, which the company has fixed over the years in a series of patches and updates, while also adding other quality of life features to the game such as more detailed maps, difficulty options, a land vehicle and much more in the game’s recent “Free Lanes” update.
The Free Lanes update coincided with the game’s launch on PS5, something many PlayStation owners were looking forward to this year. Because it’s likely that those who game on PS5 were disgruntled by the fact that Starfield only launched on PC and Xbox Series X/S back in the day, having to wait until April 2026 to get their hands on a PlayStation version.
Nonetheless, Starfield was the top-selling game in the US during its launch week, as was recently revealed by a video game analyst on Bluesky (via Eurogamer).
“Starfield was the best-selling video game of the week in tracked physical & digital US full game dollar sales during the week ending April 11”, said video game analyst Matt Piscatella. “It’s the first time Starfield has led the weekly US best-selling titles chart since week ending Sept 2, 2023”, added the man.
These sales equate to about 140,000 copies sold of Starfield as had been reported earlier by outlets like metro.co.uk. But another video game analyst (they are everywhere these days it seems) has criticized these sales, saying that they are not that impressive for a premier Xbox exclusive like Starfield.
“While these would be decent numbers for many ports, it’s not fantastic for a port of the biggest Bethesda RPG in a decade”, said Rhys Elliot of Alinea Analytics in an X post.
The man posted a chart in which Starfield’s sales on PS5 don’t look so good when compared to those of other Xbox-published games on the console (see below). Such a comparison, though, does not seem fair (at least not right now) because Starfield’s first week sales are compared to those of other games like The Outer Worlds 2 and Avowed. The Outer Worlds 2 was released on PS5 in October last year, while Avowed hit the PS5 in February of 2025. So they’ve been much longer in the market than Bethesda’s Starfield has, then.
Starfield has sold 140K copies on PS5 a week after launch (@alineaanalytics estimates).
While these would be decent numbers for many ports, it’s not fantastic for a port of the biggest Bethesda RPG in a decade (although launch-aligned, it’s selling faster than other Xbox games… pic.twitter.com/pGoO00OjKG
— Rhys Elliott (@superhys) April 14, 2026
Nonetheless, it does seem fair to question whether Starfield has been a success for Bestheda and its owner Microsoft to date, though. According to this video game analyst, the game had sold close to 4 million copies on Steam (and another million on Xbox) before the PS5 version saw the light of day.
So taking into account extra sales on Steam due to people picking up the game due to the Free Lanes update, and those PS5 copies sold to date, the total number will be close to 5 million. Which is not bad for any other game but maybe not so impressive for an eagerly awaited RPG from a studio like Bethesda which had been a decade in the making and everybody was talking about…
The game is estimated to have made a whopping $300 million US dollars to date, but taking into account that Bethesda employs more than 500 developers and those 10 years of development and it may be that the game has hardly broken even for Microsoft and Bestheda… This is bad news for those hoping for a Starfield 2 – it won’t happen anytime soon, especially not now with Bethesda devoting almost all its manpower to their next Elder Scrolls game…
But still, the game can still sell plenty more copies on PS5 if sales pick up in the remainder of the year. Plus, Bethesda appears to be gearing up to launch a Nintendo Switch 2 version of Starfield, meaning potentially more sales of the space faring RPG. Meanwhile, the company has vowed to keep supporting Starfield and releasing more stuff for the game, meaning gamers who bought the game will be having fun with it for quite some time yet it seems.