Starfield's revenue estimates may expose big flaw in Xbox's business model

New estimates from Alinea Analytics put Starfield's total gross sales revenues at around $300 million on all platforms, including the first week on PS5 sales. Bethesda's most successful game of all time, Skyrim, managed to make double that in its first month.

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Starfield launched right into Xbox Game Pass, so it's not a surprise that the game sold many fewer copies than previous Bethesda RPGs. Microsoft's subscription can impact full product sales as consumers can pay $30 once--or even twice--and still pay less than a full-priced game, an effect referred to as "cannibalization" in the industry. The effect was widely discussed in the 2023 FTC v Microsoft trial, and the UK's competitions authority also found that Game Pass is expected to reduce game sales by specific percentages.

While specifics remain unclear, some analysts have attempted to estimate Starfield's revenue, with Alinea Analytics reporting that the game could have made around $300 million in sales on Xbox, PS5, and PC. That's...not an earth-shattering figure, especially for Bethesda, who is used to selling tens of millions of copies of its games. A quick comparison shows that Skyrim made double that of Starfield in just 30 days, compared to Starfield's ~2.5 years.

Our findings show that Skyrim made $650 million in its first month of sales, and while this was far and away Bethesda's most popular game insofar as sales and acclaim, Skyrim also had the benefit of launching on three platforms: Xbox 360, PS3, and PC, compared to Starfield's Xbox Series X/S and PC. Plus, Skyrim did not launch into Game Pass.

"All in, Starfield has cleared over $300M in revenue across all platforms. That's hugely successful in a vacuum. But - as I mentioned at the top of the article - in the context of a Bethesda budget and a decade-long development cycle, Starfield has likely barely broken even," Alinea Analytics' Rhys Elliott said in the latest newsletter.

Based on these metrics alone, it seems that this performance exposes one of the biggest flaws of Microsoft's Game Pass model, and Starfield in particular was hit hard by a one-two punch to sales.

Purchases were affected by Game Pass as users opted to subscribe rather than to buy the game outright, and also by not launching day one on the market's most lucrative console storefront, PlayStation.

That being said, it's hard to tell how much money Bethesda may have raked in from Game Pass usage bonuses. It was revealed that Game Pass made nearly $5 billion in revenue for the first time throughout FY25, which runs from July 2024 - June 2025. It's unclear how often that Game Pass subscribers are playing Starfield--more playtime can net more revenue for first-party developers and publishers who release their games onto the service, but this calculus remains mysterious.

Ex-Bethesda marketing VP Pete Hines hinted at this issues with his takes on Game Pass, telling DBLTAP in September 2025:

"At the same time, I'm involved enough to know I saw what I considered to be some short-sighted decision making several years ago, and it seems to be bearing out the way I said. Subscriptions have become the new four letter word, right? You can't buy a product anymore.

"When you talk about a subscription that relies on content, if you don't figure out how to balance the needs of the service and the people running the service with the people who are providing the content--without which your subscription is worth jack shit--, then you have a real problem.

"You need to properly acknowledge, compensate and recognize what it takes to create that content and not just make a game, but make a product.

"That tension is hurting a lot of people, including the content creators themselves, because they're fitting into an ecosystem that is not properly valuing and rewarding what they're making."