With no announcement of the Starfield release date in sight – apart from the fact it’s coming after Redfall – many of us are wondering when we can expect the Bethesda RPG game to finally come out, and now Xbox boss Phil Spencer has spoken about why the delay to the space game will work in favour of the final release.
Spencer is CEO of Gaming at Microsoft, and he talked in a recent interview with The Verge about how he’s got experience with getting game releases wrong, and how this informed the decision to delay the Starfield release date, which we still don’t know just yet – I’d expect a Starfield Game Pass release mid 2023, at least.
“I have shipped games too early. We have experienced shipping games too early,” explains Spencer. “In hindsight, when you look at a game like Starfield, it’s taken so long and so much investment in new IP from the team. The decision to give the team the time to build the game that they feel they should be building is just the right thing to do. There are financial implications to those decisions.”
The Xbox boss then tied the Starfield release date delay more into how it factors as a business decision, and just just one that allows Bethesda the time to complete their creation. “Weighing what is going to happen, whether it’s platform growth, subscriber growth, or frankly, the revenue that you generate when a new game launches, those are business decisions. You definitely have to weigh the outcome of those decisions.”
Understandably, Bethesda’s next big open-world game has much more riding on it than the game itself. It’s part of Xbox’s ecosystem of releases, and in turn part of pushing subscriptions. There’s no secret that Xbox’s first party offerings have been lacking this year, with Starfield already surpassing its original release date, Redfall being delayed, and many projects in the works that we haven’t been updated on since. To be clear, Xbox has had some exclusives this year, but the offerings have been relatively slim.
According to Spencer, this Starfield release date delay should end up being the right decision, and one that will pay off in the long run. You can read the full interview with Spencer on The Verge’s website.
“I just wanted to make sure those teams felt they had all the support they could get from Xbox… In the end, I believe the quality of the games will be better and customers will find the experience to be more interesting, which will hopefully feel like the right decision in hindsight.”
If you want more from the space game, we did a Starfield interview with an ex-Bethesda developer that revealed quite a lot about the game, and we’ve put together a Starfield traits guide of what we know so far. It even looks like the Elder Scrolls’ adoring fan has made their way into Starfield too.
