apparently this is in response to a few threads on Reddit flaming Starfield—in general, it’s been rather interesting to see Bethesda take what i can only describe as a “try to debate Starfield to popularity” approach with the game’s skeptics in the past month or two. not entirely sure it’s a winning strategy, personally.
I don’t know how accurate this data is, but it would seem NMS and Starfield had a similar number of players in their first month:
And I expect they were a very similar audience. So I don’t think the bar for what to expect was very different. If anything, the bar should have been much higher for the AAA game.