Starfield Tops UK Retail Sales, Might Be the Biggest Launch of 2023

Starfield has topped the weekly retail game sales chart in the United Kingdom, according to GamesIndustry.biz head Christopher Dring, who explained that the figure is particularly impressive because Xbox sales tend to skew heavily toward digital. According to Dring, when adding in Game Pass, Starfield could be the biggest launch of the year in terms of player counts in the United Kingdom.

Starfield is No.1 in the UK boxed charts, which is impressive. It’s not the biggest physical launch of 2023 (it’s behind Hogwarts Legacy, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Resident Evil 4 remake, Final Fantasy XVI, and Dead Island 2 on that list), but it’s almost identical to Diablo IV, and that’s significant because Diablo IV was a major digital hit. Starfield will be similar because it’s on the two most digital platforms (PC & Xbox Series S|X). Note: Diablo is also on PS5, which does ok physically.

Throw in Game Pass… this might be the biggest launch of 2023. And that’s saying something.

While Xbox does not publicly share sales data, they share it with Europe’s GSD, the UK’s GfK, and Circana in the US. Dring has access to this data, having reported on UK and European retail game sales for a decade and a half.

In a follow-up tweet, Dring said Starfield definitely sold more than Final Fantasy XVI and explained why, too:

It’s because PS5 games do quite well physically (not as well as Switch, but better than Xbox). So FF16’s physical numbers are okay; digital was about the same. In Starfield’s case, I’d expect 80%+ sales to be digital based on usual Xbox performance. Add in Game Pass… It’s another level.

Anyway, Starfield topping the UK weekly chart is particularly significant also because the Xbox Series S|X combination is far less popular than PlayStation and Nintendo consoles in the country.

We already knew the game was doing well after Microsoft Gaming CEO announced over a million concurrent players; then, Bethesda said Starfield had become their biggest title with over six million players. Over the weekend, the game surpassed Skyrim’s concurrent player count on Steam, settling at over 330K simultaneous players around fourteen hours ago.