It’s not only Bethesda enjoying a good sales week from Starfield. Microsoft is also enjoying a boost in sales for its Xbox Series X and Series S for the week ending September 2, the second day of Bethesda’s early access period for its latest space exploration RPG.
According to data collected by GamesIndustry.Biz, sales for the Xbox consoles jumped by 76% for the week mentioned above in the United Kingdom alone.
Of course, Starfield is not the sole factor in the sales boost, which is also partially brought about by the release of the new Xbox Series S 1TB edition. According to GfK, 24% of the console sales between August 27 and September 2 were 1TB Xbox Series S units.
On the other hand, Starfield’s early access period also helped by accounting for a 46% increase in the standard Xbox Series S model.
Bethesda has made Starfield exclusive to PC and Xbox. This fact might also have influenced the sudden rise in sales for the Xbox Series X. This is also reflected by Phil Spencer’s announcement that Starfield already has 1 million users worldwide for the early access period, which started on September 1.
GfK’s Dorian Bloch described the August 27 - September 2 week as the best week for Xbox regarding sales. He added that the positive sales performance persisted until September 9, when 20% of sales were the new Series S 1TB version.
Following the dismal performance of Nvidia GPUs when running Starfield, Bethesda announced yesterday that it will release a series of patches that will eventually add native DLSS support.
This follows after Nvidia released a new Game Ready driver to remedy Starfield performance issues and the controversial paywall and subsequent hacking of PureDark’s DLSS3 mod for the game.
Bethesda also announced that it has made Starfield available to users in the GeForce Now cloud gaming platform. This means that people who cannot afford to upgrade their rigs to accommodate the game's specs can now play Starfield.