Oof. It turns out that dragging Starfield across the console war battlefield and plopping it onto PlayStation 5 wasn't quite the power move Bethesda might have hoped for. According to TheGamer, the space RPG is doing... fine. Just fine. Aggressively, disappointingly fine.
We're talking 'modest hit' territory here, which in gaming PR speak is roughly equivalent to your mom saying your drawing is 'very creative.' Starfield hasn't flopped face-first into the void of space, but it's absolutely not lighting the PS5 charts on fire either.
Meanwhile, Forza is in a different dimension entirely
For context on just how 'modest' we're talking - TheGamer points out that the game is nowhere near the performance of Forza Horizon 5 on PlayStation. That's a racing game with no story ambiguity, no pronouns-gate discourse, and no 1,000 procedurally generated planets of empty terrain to defend. Forza just vibed onto PS5 and started printing numbers like it owned the place.
Starfield, by comparison, arrived carrying roughly 18 months of 'is this game good actually?' energy, a mixed PC legacy, and the weight of Xbox's biggest exclusive bet of the generation. That's a lot of baggage to haul through the asteroid belt.
The Xbox faithful already explored this galaxy
Here's the fundamental problem with the late port strategy: the people who were always going to love Starfield either already played it on Xbox or Game Pass day one, or they bounced off the discourse and moved on. The PS5 audience is getting a 2023 game in 2025, competing for shelf space against a year's worth of PlayStation-first releases that didn't polarize the internet for six straight months.
It's a bit like showing up to a party two hours late, only to find out everyone already ate the good snacks and moved on to a different conversation entirely. You can still have fun, but you're definitely playing catch-up.
What this means for the Xbox multiplatform strategy
Microsoft has been betting big on the 'games everywhere' approach, releasing former exclusives on PS5 to chase revenue beyond their own ecosystem. Forza Horizon 5 validated that strategy beautifully. Starfield doing lukewarm numbers suggests the approach isn't a guaranteed XP farm - game quality perception and timing matter enormously.
The real question now is whether future Xbox ports can arrive while the hype is still loaded. Because right now, Starfield on PS5 feels less like a new frontier and more like a fast travel point nobody asked to unlock.
