Crimson Desert "on track to overtake Starfield's total lifetime copies sold by the end of the year," analyst says, as PS5 sales "not fantastic for a port of the biggest Bethesda RPG in a decade"

Starfield, a previously PC and Xbox exclusive title, recently made its way onto PlayStation 5 – but the new, apparently "unplayable," port on Sony's console hasn't exactly impressed fans.

Bethesda Game Studios is aware of the issues, promising fixes this week, but it might not be enough to push Starfield on PS5 up to a very successful launch. Rhys Elliott, head of market analysis at Alinea Analytics, seems to think so anyway.

In a new online post, he writes, "Starfield has sold 140K copies on PS5 a week after launch (Alinea Analytics estimates)." While that sounds like a solid number, it's not the kind of figure Bethesda is used to pulling - Fallout 4 shipped five million copies in its first week, and even if you were to divide that up by platform, the number still dwarfs Starfield's first week on PS5.

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"While these would be decent numbers for many ports," as Elliott says, "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 that came to Xbox in the past six months, minus CoD)."

The "lukewarm PS5 sales" might not be enough – especially as "the Venn diagram of Starfield prospects on Xbox and those subscribed to Game Pass is almost a big fat circle."

Sure, the Xbox version sold over a million copies, but eight million more went to Game Pass subscribers. As the analyst puts it, "that's lost revenue." Meanwhile, Steam saw 3.7 million sales before the PS5 port. "All in, Starfield has cleared over $300M in revenue across all platforms. That's hugely successful in a vacuum," but "in the context of a Bethesda budget and a decade-long development cycle, Starfield has likely barely broken even."

It's not all down to Xbox and Game Pass, of course, with Elliott noting, "Part of Starfield’s lower-than-expected performance is because it did more of the same and didn't really build on the schools of design brought in by Breath of the Wild and Elden Ring and even other spacefaring games" that players "loved."

The analyst writes Starfield's formula "might have cut it 10 years ago, but many players have moved on."

Data reflects as much – and also suggests that "Crimson Desert, which builds on some of the more experimental things Breath of the Wild did, is on track to overtake Starfield's total lifetime copies sold by the end of the year. Ironically, this wouldn't be true if Starfield had launched day-and-date on PS5 and had not been on Game Pass on Xbox and PC."

I'd agree with Elliott here, as numbers so far certainly show Crimson Desert's success.

Heck, Pearl Abyss just celebrated "selling over five million copies worldwide" less than four weeks after launch, and it doesn't seem to be slowing down any time soon, with Steam player peaks still holding strong at around 100,000 active users a day.

Meanwhile, considering the Starfield numbers thus far and its current reputation on PS5, things aren't exactly looking too great for Bethesda's space RPG any longer – as much as some enjoy it.

Here's hoping Bethesda opts for a different approach with new games like The Elder Scrolls 6 and sees more success – I know I'll be keeping an eye on its launches, anyway.

Todd Howard agrees Starfield is "creatively different" than Bethesda's usual RPGs – but says The Elder Scrolls and Fallout were also divisive early on