According to Schreyer, Starfield retains a “deceptively high” rating only thanks to Xbox fan sites
According to Jason Schreyer, one of the most famous and successful journalists of the gaming industry, Starfield “Deceptively tall»Average reviews of reviews thanks to”many fan sites Xbox“.
Schreyer expressed this thought in an article on Bloomberg, dedicated to the best -selling games for 2023 in the United States, where Starfield appears in the eleventh place. The journalist substantiated the fall of the top ten, citing the inclusion of the game in the Game Pass catalog, its absence on the PlayStation platforms and several “weak reviews“.
Regarding the last paragraph, Schreyer makes a retreat, stating that, however, “General assessment (83 on Metacritic) deceptively high thanks to a number of fan sites Xbox“.
“Bethesda Game Studios is used to creating big hits. The developer of the video game from Maryland took second place in 2011 with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and again in 2015 with Fallout 4. But his multi-user game Fallout 76 of 2018 was not able to enter the TOP-20, and Starfield took 11th place last year, despite the big hype that preceded its launch, ”Schrayer said.
This may not seem to be a fantastic result for the first game of the studio after its acquisition of Microsoft, but there are some softening factors. Starfield has not reached the competing PlayStation console, having received weak reviews (although the aggregate assessment is deceptively high due to the number of fan sites Xbox) and, most importantly, it immediately became available in the Microsoft subscription service, similar to Netflix, Xbox Game Pass, where players are players They can access the game, paying $ 10 a month, and not buying it directly for $ 70. Bethesda recently stated that Starfield attracted 13 million players, and this suggests that many of them used Game Pass to play ”.
Schreyer also confirmed this concept on Twitter in response to the Hazegratt user, which accuses him of providing “misinformation”, saying that 5 out of 15 publications that gave the Starfield rating above 95 are portals in the name of which are “Xbox” and that the average meaning “does not correspond to a critical consensus“.
“Looking at Metacritic, out of 15 editions that set the assessment above 95/100, in the name five there are Xbox. I do not think that someone really believes that the overall assessment corresponds to the consensus of critics “.
The Hazegratt user replied, indicating that if you take as an example of Opencritic (where the average indicator is 85 based on 183 reviews compared to 90 on Metacritic), only 9 publications specialize in Xbox and therefore fundamentally are not related to the general average indicator.
It is also worth emphasizing that there are as many sites specializing exclusively in Xbox as sites for Nintendo and PlayStation, so Schreyer’s reasoning should be applied to almost any game created exclusively for the console.