Game Pass subscribers are snapping up Starfield’s $35 early access offer

[mgftp]

Surprising, perhaps I am odd but I can never see myself paying to play a "free" game a few days early unless perhaps I was completely free those few days with nothing else to do.

Game Pass subscribers are snapping up Starfield’s $35 early access upgrade.

As noted by Pure Xbox, both the US and UK versions of the Xbox Store list the Premium Edition Upgrade at number one on their Top Paid Games lists.

Further analysis by VGC shows that the upgrade is number one in almost every other country that has the Premium Edition Upgrade available for purchase, including Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, India, New Zealand, Japan and every eligible European country.

While it should come as no surprise that the most anticipated Xbox exclusive for years should be top of the Xbox charts, it’s the fact that it’s specifically the Premium Edition Upgrade that’s most notable.

The Premium Edition Upgrade is currently available for Xbox Game Pass subscribers, all of whom will get the standard edition of Starfield on September 6 anyway as part of their subscription.

While the Premium Edition Upgrade is also available for players who have pre-ordered the Standard Edition of the game, it costs more to buy the Standard Edition and the Premium Edition Upgrade than it does to just buy the Premium Edition on its own. It can be assumed, then, that most upgrade customers are Game Pass subscribers.

As such, these chart listings suggest that a large number of Xbox Game Pass subscribers are still willing to pay an extra $35 / £35, on top of their subscription cost, for Premium Edition features.

Since the most notable of these features are a story expansion that isn’t available at release, and early access to the game from September 1, it can also be assumed that many of the players paying for the Premium Edition did so for the latter.

This trend isn’t exclusive to the Xbox Store, either. As noted by GamesIndustry.biz, the ‘physical’ version of the Premium Edition Upgrade, which is just a box with a download code for the Premium Edition Upgrade in it, entered the UK charts at number seven.

The Premium Edition of the game has also seen healthy activity on Steam.

The game hit more than 230,000 concurrent players in its first two hours on Steam, despite only being in its early access period, and has continued to see similarly large numbers since then (its new 24-hour peak is more than 245,000 concurrent players).

This too showed that players were willing to buy the Premium Edition on Steam, rather than wait for the game to come to PC Game Pass on September 6.

Critical reception to the game has been largely positive, with the Xbox Series X and PC versions currently sitting on Metacritic scores of 87 and 88, respectively.

VGC’s Starfield review calls it “the ultimate Bethesda game”, saying it “takes what people loved about Fallout and Skyrim and casts it across an enormous galaxy”.

[davik]

i bought it and it sucks

[bongowongo]

I'd be more surprised if you actually play a new game op.