Price Cut Didn't Help; Starfield's Latest Reviews on Steam are Mostly Negative
Starfield ends the year with disappointing reviews on Steam. The ones from last month are mostly negative.
Starfield has been a big commercial success, but Bethesda is unlikely to be satisfied with the way the game ends the year.
- On Steam, counting only reviews from the last 30 days, only 31% of opinions are positive, which is categorized as "mostly negative" reception.
- Counting all reviews since the day of release, the share of positive ones is more than double, at 65%, but this is categorized as a "mixed" reception, which is still below expectations.
Negative reviews on Steam can hardly be considered fully authoritative. Starfield has its fair share of problems, but it is not a 31-percent game. Rather, it is an expression of players' dissatisfaction with the very slow pace of the game's development and the fixing of its most serious bugs. Fans are simply losing patience.
It is worth mentioning that currently on Steam, as part of the winter sale, the price of the game has been reduced by 30%. However, as you can see, this deal has not improved the reviews.
Systematically, although at a relatively slow pace, activity on Steam is also falling. Yesterday, at the hottest time of the day, the title was played simultaneously by 17,443 players. That's a good result for a single player game almost four months after its release, but the problem is that it's lower than several other Bethesda titles. Indeed, higher activity records were set yesterday by The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition and Fallout 4.
Of course, it should be remembered that the still high popularity of Skyrim and FO4 is driven in large part by mods. Starfield is also getting mods, but are currently they are only minor tweaks. Official modding tools will not be released until next year, and the long-term future of the game will depend on their reception. Bethesda also has plans to introduce many new features on its own, such as additional travel methods or city maps. 2024 will therefore most likely decide whether or not Starfield will be another of the team's games that players will enjoy for years to come, or will it be forgotten over time.
