So is this it for Starfield?

[DocClox]

1 hour ago, Lewdest said:

hink if the modders all give up on this game than Bethesda wins

 

Nah. Bethesda loses. The modding community has kept their games fresh and active and given them a shelf life way past all expectations, to say nothing of earning the company a tremendous amount of good will.

 

But none of that shows up on a spreadsheet, and so it is not valued. And they're willing to throw it all away for an income stream that probably isn't going to amount to more than a rounding error on the balance sheets.

 

Thing is, they've been trying to get this working for ten years. Hell, they've wanted an MTX stream since Horse Armour. They're going to keep at it. We lose, Beth loses everyone's the poorer. But none of that shows up on a spreadsheet, so they're going to do it anyway.

[Lewdest]

1 hour ago, DocClox said:

 

Nah. Bethesda loses. The modding community has kept their games fresh and active and given them a shelf life way past all expectations, to say nothing of earning the company a tremendous amount of good will.

 

But none of that shows up on a spreadsheet, and so it is not valued. And they're willing to throw it all away for an income stream that probably isn't going to amount to more than a rounding error on the balance sheets.

 

Thing is, they've been trying to get this working for ten years. Hell, they've wanted an MTX stream since Horse Armour. They're going to keep at it. We lose, Beth loses everyone's the poorer. But none of that shows up on a spreadsheet, so they're going to do it anyway.

I mean, fair enough it's just unfortunate. Been waiting for a game like starfield for so long that's also as moddable as fallout or skyrim.

[cell289]

 

You know what? I could dogpile on with more impassioned ranting on how disappointing the final product was, but how about instead we do some research and try and figure out the whole picture with statistics, math, facts, and logic. Just for funsies, alright?

 

So, the bottom line, Starfield had 13 million players on launch day (Note, not copies sold). Microsoft makes things shifty here with their PC Gamepass service. But let's assume that every player who essentially paid a $10 sub for a month and the hardcore fans who overpaid for the $300 collectors edition with the gaudy plastic watch canceled each other out. The number that's been generally settled on is $657 million, about in line with Fallout 4 with 13 million concrete copies sold and $750 million in revenue.

 

That's an amazing number. It really is. I would love to have a cool $657 mil in my pocket. However, that's not the full story. While Starfield made only a little less than one of the best selling games of all time, Starfield and Fallout 4's expenses are not the same.

 

Fallout 4 had 1,407 employees listed in their credits, while Starfield's credits list 4,037 employees (A 187% staff increase!!!). The marketing campaign was exponentially larger. Bethesda Studios has an unhealthy habit of overproducing physical merch that goes unsold and then straight into a landfill. The budget for Starfield was in the conservative ballpark of 300-400 million. 

 

So, we're not looking at $657 million, we're looking at something more like $257 million in sales*.

 

Still! Wow! $257 million! That still is in the top 20% of best-selling games! Any other game developer studio would be happy just dreaming about a project reaching those numbers.

 

But Bethesda Game Studios isn't like most game development studios. Bethesda made a deal with the fucking devil.    

 

Microsoft bought the Zenimax studio family for 7.5 billion, with a capital B. Todd walked into conference rooms with Microsoft execs and assured them Starfield and Elder Scrolls 6 would bring in a return on investment in the billions.

 

After all, release day was just the start! They didn't plan for Starfield to make billions in its release, the money was going to come from Starfield being a community-driven microtransactions machine. This was supposed to be Microsoft's answer to Roblox. 

 

So, how is that panning out? Is Starfield a post-launch success? Well, as far as I can tell, one paid mod of note came out in October. McClarence Outfitters: Legendary Customization by Kinggath, still trying to perform some miracle CPR on this Creation Club disaster. How well did it do?  Well, it got 19,123 views on PC and 44,915 views on Xbox. (Ignore the intentionally misleading 'plays' stat, it represents the number of times the game has been started, including resuming a saved game, with the mod installed, and thus is an irrelevant statistic.) So, let's be generous and assume 15% of players who viewed the microtransaction page actually bought it, that sums up to ... 9,606 sales, minus Kinggath's cut, which is unfortunately under NDA, but I think we can safely assume Microsoft isn't going to see a return on their billions any time soon.

 

In fact, I think Microsoft's silence speaks volumes. In Microsoft's Annual 2024 Earnings Report, Bethesda Games Studios and Starfield was not mentioned one time in their contributions to yearly earnings in the gaming sector section. Not. One. Time.

 

Also, we need to have an aside about the Creation Kit. Bethesda is betting everything on a Skyrim level of mod support and microtransaction spending extending the life of Starfield for the next 10 years. But this Creation Kit release is just too fucking complicated. Nobody knows how to navigate the menus to place a simple prop on a piece of planet terrain. Asset creation is still basically inaccessible to hobbyist-level modders due to them using closed-source formats for models and animations, And Bethesda has provided zero documentation on the changes they've made during the last nine years between FO4 CK and SF CK. The Creation Kit and its library of included assets was amazing, in 2008. It was really something when your only alternatives were licensing Unreal or learning C++ from scratch and writing a whole game engine by yourself. But Unity and Godot exist now. Why on earth would I touch the Creation Kit in current year when I can drag a .blend file into the viewport inside Godot and the model, with its animations and textures, is just ... there? 

 

Anyone who is still hoping for the modding community to come in on angel wings to save the game, I need you to understand; In the whole world, only ~55 modders are proficient and dedicated enough to log into Starfield's Creation Kit and put up with it daily. This is objectively not enough. Even Atlas can shrug.        

 

So, In summary,

 

Was Starfield an abysmal sales failure? No. It did reasonably. As reasonable as any rational person could expect. And it still doesn't matter one bit. It was never going to be enough. I fully expect Microsoft to announce they are shuttering BGS, and are going to sell the IP rights to Fallout to Amazon Prime in a landmark billion-dollar deal to recoup their losses in 2025. And I think everyone in the BGS office knows it. That's why the attempts to save Starfield with patches and DLCs have been so apathetic, that's why Emil is railing at the fans like he doesn't even care about keeping his job, and that's why Todd is planning his exit strategy into an executive producer on the Fallout TV show at Amazon. Some of them might be relieved, in a way, that they'll never have to face the music and live up to the expectations of Elder Scrolls 6. But we always knew that was going to be the case deep down, right? After all, you tell enough sweet little lies, eventually that check gets too big to cash.

 

*Shattered space was a wet fart in the wind and not worth the mental effort to calculate into Starfield sales

Spoiler

Yeah, that's right, I did in fact put this much effort into a post on a sex mod forum

 

Edited November 5, 2024 by cell289
typo

[Reigor]

5 hours ago, cell289 said:

You know what? I could dogpile on with more impassioned ranting on how disappointing the final product was, but how about instead we do some research and try and figure out the whole picture with statistics, math, facts, and logic. Just for funsies, alright?

 

Interesting read overall. Thank you for sharing it.

 

5 hours ago, cell289 said:

But Bethesda Game Studios isn't like most game development studios. Bethesda made a deal with the fucking devil.    

 

This was problem number one, though I would add that Zenimax didn't help matters by wanting its studios to spit out live service products (FO76, Redfall, etc...), which in the case Arkane's Redfall, the staff there did not want to make and they had a huge turn over of talent. For BGS, Todd and co wanted to make Starfield and they had to divert resources into making and then fixing 76. Big money ruins everything. 

 

The other issue was the rapid ramping up of staff, going from a 100 something in one studio to 500-1000 across multiple ones. Then having the key visionary, the charismatic dude that everyone said Yes to, Todd, having to spend most of his time hopping from one place to another splitting his attention between multiple projects. Starfield suffered greatly of having disparate teams doing there own thing or doing nothing because of that lack of a unifying vision. 

 

Had the Zenimax heads not wanted a buyout and were content with their studio's making high quality games which sold well, I think would have made a difference in the final product. 

 

6 hours ago, cell289 said:

So, how is that panning out? Is Starfield a post-launch success? Well, as far as I can tell, one paid mod of note came out in October. McClarence Outfitters: Legendary Customization by Kinggath, still trying to perform some miracle CPR on this Creation Club disaster. How well did it do? 

 

I really do think they should have followed the Linden Labs model for the Second Life marketplace. Host a service that WORKS (not just works) and only take a 10 percent cut, not the 70 percent cut that I have seen reported. It should be a nice little bonus income to cover the cost of supporting the game in the years to come so that future sales would be generated. Instead we got a blatant money grab that has alienated some excellent mod authors who wanted to mod Starfield.

 

 

6 hours ago, cell289 said:

Anyone who is still hoping for the modding community to come in on angel wings to save the game, I need you to understand; In the whole world, only ~55 modders are proficient and dedicated enough to log into Starfield's Creation Kit and put up with it daily. This is objectively not enough. Even Atlas can shrug.   

 

Not sure where your only 55 modders come from. Regarding the SFCK, having tried to make mods with it myself, the lack of documentation, official wiki, tutorials, is telling. The CK wasn't ready for release. The game wasn't ready for release. I think they needed another 1-2 years in development stage working on just the engine upgrade itself, developing the in house tools for animation, lip sync, sound, whatever that would eventually be shared with the modding community. Also, please correct me if I am wrong, but can Unreal and Unity do all the stuff that the CK can in regards to interactive objects, location and scene creation, rpg mechanics, etc?  

 

 

6 hours ago, cell289 said:

Some of them might be relieved, in a way, that they'll never have to face the music and live up to the expectations of Elder Scrolls 6. But we always knew that was going to be the case deep down, right? After all, you tell enough sweet little lies, eventually that check gets too big to cash.

 

This ending undercuts your previous arguments. Todd is the pitchman. His lies and exaggerations about the product do not have anything to do with the big money decisions that ruined BGS and other great studios like Arkane. 

 

 

[cell289]

55 minutes ago, Reigor said:

Not sure where your only 55 modders come from.

 

So admittedly, this data point is very weird. But, unless the virtually every modder is using xEdit instead, which I don't think is the case, it looks like only 50 to 60 modders have the creation kit open in any given 24 hour period!

 

And it's been remarkably consistent every day for months, leading me to believe it's mostly the same 50 people. 

 

Maybe that's a reach. I genuinely don't know.

 

Tell me how else I should be reading this, please. It doesn't feel right to me either, with the members of this forum alone dwarfing that, yet here it is.

 

Steam Stats for Starfield Creation Kit

 

 

Edited November 5, 2024 by cell289

[DocClox]

Well, 50 users is t he 24 hour peak, but it's been consistent at about 70 for the last three months.

 

 

What is interesting is that numbers at release were double that, and dropped to the current numbers around the time the CK was released to the general public. Probably because Beth were pressuring a bunch of them to get something ready for the Creations launch day, and once the deadline passed, a bunch of them decided to take a break.

 

It is telling that the number is so small, however they may be composed. That said, don't rule out a lot of people still working with xEdit and similar tools. Starfield racked up thousands of mods on Nexus before the CK was released to the public and with the lack of CK documentation, those non-VBC modders who haven't been completely soured on the pastime may well still be  using what's worked for them in the past.  Of course, getting numbers for those people is going to be problematic.

Edited November 6, 2024 by DocClox

[nIn nIn nIn]

It's all well and good saying BGS made a deal with the devil = Microsoft aquiring ownership of Zenimax (and all it's assets).

 

What was the alternative?

 

Sony was in talks with Zenimax to buy BGS. The goal obviously being to make Starfield and all future releases Playstation exclusive. That would have been an absolute disaster for us. Sony HATES the modding scene. They would have locked everything down. And odds are with them owning the Elder Scrolls and Fallout IP's, they would have begun to shut down all third party modding sites with cease and desist letters followed by lawsuits when those did not cower the community.

 

Microsoft are the ones who made the decision to stop that by swooping in and buying Zenimax itself. If anything, Microsoft has saved modding for BGS games, past, present and future.

 

 

[brown66]

4 hours ago, nIn nIn nIn said:

It's all well and good saying BGS made a deal with the devil = Microsoft aquiring ownership of Zenimax (and all it's assets).

 

What was the alternative?

 

Sony was in talks with Zenimax to buy BGS. The goal obviously being to make Starfield and all future releases Playstation exclusive. That would have been an absolute disaster for us. Sony HATES the modding scene. They would have locked everything down. And odds are with them owning the Elder Scrolls and Fallout IP's, they would have begun to shut down all third party modding sites with cease and desist letters followed by lawsuits when those did not cower the community.

 

Microsoft are the ones who made the decision to stop that by swooping in and buying Zenimax itself. If anything, Microsoft has saved modding for BGS games, past, present and future.

 

 

 

And it was precisely because Microsoft bought Bethesda, preventing future games from this company from being able to be played on PlayStation that, after the wave of initial disbelief from PlayStation fans, they exploded in a wave of hatred and invaded Reedit, the Nexus forums, YouTube and even this website to express their hatred for Starfield and Bethesda, the same game and company that they previously, with so much expectation, hoped would become a PlayStation exclusive.

 

And these were joined by those frustrated because their laptop or their desktop computer, which is already a few years old, is too weak to play Starfield, when it can normally play Skyrim and even, in the case of some, Fallout 4. Added to these haters are the Fallout 4 fanatics who thought Starfield would be Fallout 4 in space.

 

But when it comes to mods, we must be very careful!

 

Look what happened to Minecraft. It was mods and the huge community of gamers they attract that led Microsoft to buy their small publisher for a whopping $2.5 billion. And now Microsoft is doing everything it can to control mods and the game. My son is an expert in this game and I watched his growth, having conversations with him at the dinner table, in which he described to me what happened before and after with this game and its mods when Microsot bought it from Mojang Studios. For those who don't know, Microsoft now declares that all mods made for the latest version of Minecraft, which was made by Microsoft, are now the intellectual property of Microsoft.

 

Until now, Microsoft has turned a blind eye to independent mods for Starfield, fulfilling the implicit promise they made when they bought Bethesda, but if the free modding community starts to turn only to mods under the control of Microsoft (read Bethesda), with the few remaining free modders sulking about not get attention, so get ready for the only possible mods in Elders Scrolls 6 to be those made available by the Bethesda platform, under full control of Microsoft. Microsoft will only not dare to do this if the community of free mods remains united and strong and Microsoft finds that boycotting this community will lead to losses in sales of future Bethesda games.

 

Meanwhile, it's just over an hour before I get home and head back to Shattered Space. So far it's been a pleasant surprise, considering the wave of hate this DLC has received.

 

I'm just not going to say it's Bethesda's best DLC because I haven't played it completely yet, but it's on track to be.

 

Edited November 5, 2024 by brown66
English corrections.

[DocClox]

18 hours ago, nIn nIn nIn said:

Sony was in talks with Zenimax to buy BGS.

 

 

 

It's worse than that. They approached EA first. Can you imagine how that would have worked out?

 

I still think MS were probably the best of a bad lot when it comes to potential buyers.

Edited November 6, 2024 by DocClox

[Djlegends]

15 hours ago, DocClox said:

Well, 50 users is t he 24 hour peak, but it's been consistent at about 70 for the last three months.

 

 

What is interesting is that numbers at release were double tha, and dropped to the current numbers around the time the CK was released to the general public. Probably because Beth were pressuring a bunch of them to get something ready for the Creations launch day, and once the deadline passed, a bunch of them decided to take a break.

 

It is telling that the number is so small, however they may be composed. That said, don't rule out a lot of people still working with xEdit and similar tools. Starfield racked up thousands of mods on Nexus before the CK was released to the public and with the lack of CK documentation, those non-VBC modders who haven't been completely soured on the pastime may well still be  using what's worked for them in the past.  Of course, getting numbers for those people is going to be problematic.

btw Steam doesn't track those that use MO2 to boot up SF CK

[Reigor]

15 hours ago, nIn nIn nIn said:

What was the alternative?

 

 

Zenimax remaining independent and focusing on making games for all platforms instead of trying to up their "value" for a buyout. 

 

Not that BGS is blameless for Starfield's state. Having decided to create a brand new universe, something BGS has not done before, they could have justified hiring a team of sci-fi authors to create the setting, lore, and stories. Considering how much Zenimax was willing to spend to expand BGS I don't think they would have balked on that. 

[Reigor]

54 minutes ago, Djlegends said:

btw Steam doesn't track those that use MO2 to boot up SF CK

 

*raises hand* Does that include players that play Starfield through MO2 or Vortex?

[nIn nIn nIn]

1 hour ago, Reigor said:

 

Zenimax remaining independent and focusing on making games for all platforms instead of trying to up their "value" for a buyout. 

 

Not that BGS is blameless for Starfield's state. Having decided to create a brand new universe, something BGS has not done before, they could have justified hiring a team of sci-fi authors to create the setting, lore, and stories. Considering how much Zenimax was willing to spend to expand BGS I don't think they would have balked on that. 

 

Zenimax was FOR SALE. Only 2 buyers came forward. Sony and Microsoft.  They were going to sell up no matter what. Remember, Zenimax was a private company, not a public shareholder company. So any sale of the company is a decision made solely by the owner. Unlike hostile takeovers where the buyer buys the company out from under the "owner" by buying up a controlling number of shares.

 

Your third option of independence is just another fantasy - as much as we ALL wish things remained as they were. Myself included.

[nIn nIn nIn]

1 hour ago, Reigor said:

 

*raises hand* Does that include players that play Starfield through MO2 or Vortex?

 

Not sure of that. My hours played are updated and I never use steam to launch the game. Only MO2.

[Djlegends]

13 hours ago, Reigor said:

 

*raises hand* Does that include players that play Starfield through MO2 or Vortex?

vortex idk mo2 yes

[Ijakor2]

back to the roots.....

https://gothic.thqnordic.com/

 

in case microsoft forgot.....

 

[pashax]

On 11/5/2024 at 6:21 AM, DocClox said:

It is telling that the number is so small, however they may be composed.

Another possibility is that people might be waiting for Starfield to stabilize before putting too much effort into it.  

[Lemurion287]

I really think it's all about the lip-syncing. Once modders get the ability to easily add lip-sync data to mods then things like companions and serious quest mods become practical.

[Djlegends]

47 minutes ago, Lemurion287 said:

I really think it's all about the lip-syncing. Once modders get the ability to easily add lip-sync data to mods then things like companions and serious quest mods become practical.

thats mainly it, many skyrim modders I know keep asking where lipsync lol

[Allnarta]

10 hours ago, Lemurion287 said:

I really think it's all about the lip-syncing. Once modders get the ability to easily add lip-sync data to mods then things like companions and serious quest mods become practical.

 

It was never an issue for neither of BGS games. There is a lot of quest mods that didn't have any voice acting at all, and it was never an obstacle to make quest, NSFW or dialogue-including mods by any mean.

 

Only difference here is that paid mods require voice acting. Which makes you assume that reason of it being obstacle for SF is that 99% of quest mods will most likely be paid.

[Trykz]

Here it is in a nutshell:

 

When BGS announced Starfield and started showing bits and pieces of it, I was an instant fan.

A spacefaring shooter with customizable ships? Yep. I was sold. I remember remarking somewhere

here on LL about a lot of the meshes they were showing looking very familiar, and very much like

many of Fallout 4's vault meshes. And then I recall Todd saying "Starfield will be our most modder

friendly game to date" (or somesuch). And that was it. I pre-ordered and waited with much

anticipation for launch day.

 

When launch day arrived (and after the purchase of a 2Tb NVME SSD), I loaded the game and all seemed

good to go. And for the most part, it was. A few minor issues, but nothing really game-breaking for me.

So I played the game as updates rolled out every couple weeks to patch out the few bugs I was seeing

here and there.

 

After a week or so, I started to notice some things.

 

Quests were quite repetitive. The Starborn stuff felt really corny. And that's when I realized I was really

playing Skyrim in space. runing around collecting "space magic". But I figured "Hey, no problem. The

CK will be out in a few weeks, and a lot of this will be addressed by the slowly growing mod community".

I couldn't wait to get my hands on it. And then, after months of waiting, I did.

 

And then I went looking for the CK documentation.

 

And that's when I figured it out.

 

Starfield wasn't going to be the "modders paradise" that Todd claimed it would be. Elder Scrolls 6

and Fallout 5? Not even interested anymore. Don't care if they never launch.

 

They've been trying this "paid mods" bullshit for years. Apparently, they didn't get the glaring warning

that seasoned creators have been sending this whole time.

 

"Bring that shit to our door, and it will tank the title it comes attached to as seasoned modders walk away".

 

Well, you reap what you sow, Todd. You reap what you sow.

 

So I'm back to Skyrim and FO4. I played through your "space magic" game and it's DLC once.

And that was enough for me. Lesson learned.

 

To lose a die-hard Sci-Fi space fan like me? Who grew up watching Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar

Galactica (both old and new) and the like, and playing Eve Online for over two decades? For a cash grab?

Yeah. You fucked up. And it's going to take a damned miracle to turn this shitshow around. If it can be.

 

I won't hold my breath.

[TheRightDoorIsNotTheLeft]

I agree with what you wrote, Trykz, but I don't think I can go back to Skyrim. I tried, and even with mods, the FACES are HORRIBLE. And so many of even the LL mods didn't improve the faces (to be fair, it probably wasn't their intent to improve the faces). For all the faults of Starfield, at least the faces are better -- except for those damned moo people in the cities. You know, the ones you can decrease in number in the game settings. 

[Djlegends]

4 hours ago, TheRightDoorIsNotTheLeft said:

I agree with what you wrote, Trykz, but I don't think I can go back to Skyrim. I tried, and even with mods, the FACES are HORRIBLE. And so many of even the LL mods didn't improve the faces (to be fair, it probably wasn't their intent to improve the faces). For all the faults of Starfield, at least the faces are better -- except for those damned moo people in the cities. You know, the ones you can decrease in number in the game settings. 

I just can't go back into Fallout 4 since its a dam slough plus i got used to SF movement😭

[Djlegends]

plus going back to modding fo4/SSE feels archaic asf
Skyrim quest making feels like crap compared to simple edits with SF

[Blehbreh]

I think it's best to be prepared for Bethesda to close its doors within the next couple of years permanently. There's a huge industry shift going on right now and we are going to see many big name companies go under due to poor sales and continuously higher budgets for games that will ultimately fail. Bethesda got too comfortable with the support of their community to the point where it seemed that they weren't even putting up any effort on their end, and a lot of that is likely at their investors' requests. Can't say that Todd and his management team is completely to blame as investors in the industry have been making decisions and giving advice that are at times very anti-consumer.

 

I personally didn't purchase Starfield because I saw how poorly the game was received by players at launch. I wasn't a fan of Fallout 4, and because of some of the decisions made in it's development and it being Bethesda's last in-house title, I fully expected Starfield to be a disaster. I didn't at all expect it to be as bad as it actually was though. Not a horrible unplayable mess by any means, but so unbelievably bland and rigid. With the way every release seems to be getting worse, I think I'm glad there probably wont be an Elder Scrolls VI.

 

If the game isn't very well loved by Bethesda fans, there's barely any reason to keep modding it. A lot of the most seasoned CK modders probably have families now to attend to. To return to a game they might not like just to keep up an appearance would be ridiculous. Everything happens at least once, and this is the just the first Bethesda game in years to not get by long past it's shelf life due to modders and the community.

 

(And I'm not trying to say the Fallout 4 was a bad game either, if you liked Fallout 4 I'm happy for you.)