I figured FFXVI was going to be divisive amongst parts of the fanbase and critics just based on how many drastic changes were made and the story being more western focused. And that’s exactly how it turned out. It still for the most part hit it out of the park, but there were those on the mixed side that brought the score down.

Starfield on the other hand, feels like Bethesda’s magnum opus. The game is taking something from every game they’ve previously made, even Fallout Shelter, and incorporating it all into a single game. Elden Ring had a similar feeling where it felt like a natural progression of FromSoft’s formula.

So unless something goes horribly wrong in the technical department, I think Starfield has a great chance to score in the mid 90s

Worst I said Starfield would do is an 87. So best outcome for now baring a colapes is a tie.

2 months... 

Anyone here taking off work to play? 

My understanding is that they do still have a fairly reliable method of obtaining user counts even though their data is no longer exact due to that 2018 Valve policy update. They claim to only have a 2% margin of error with the method they are using, which means they believe there is only a 2% chance that FF15 or FF13 has sold less than 1m copies or more than 2m copies, since they have them both in the 1-2m range. I believe what they do is take a sample of users who have agreed to share their data with them, and then extrapolate that number up to the Steam userbase at large.

We also have the 2018 Steam data leak to look at. Obviously those numbers are older, but you can use them to guesstimate current sales based on known game leg trends. FF13 was only at 707k owners on Steam as of the 2018 leak, 4 years after it's 2014 steam release, meaning it is on the low end of SteamSpy's 1-2m range prediction for sure, games don't typically more than double the sales they had at the 4 year mark. I believe Spy had it in the range that was below 1-2m until just last year, so I'd guess it has sold 1.1m at most, meaning another 400k sales since it was at 707k 6 years ago in July 2018. As for FF15, it was at 489k Steam owners as of the July 2018 leak, which happened about 4 months after the game released on Steam in March 2018. Based on known Steam game leg trends, that suggests that now, as of 2023, FFXV has sold more on steam than FF13 has, but likely less than 1.5m. It would be very rare for a game to more than triple it's first 4 month sales lifetime, only a few games can pull that off, even on Steam with it's deep discounts in the seasonal Steam sales.

Now it is worth noting of course that both games were day one releases on Xbox, and late ports on Steam. Maybe FF would sell more than Xbox on PC if Square would actually release day one on all 3 platforms, but we'll never know for sure unless Square does a brand new mainline Final Fantasy that is on Xbox, PC, and PS day one.

Idk. Starfield doesn’t really seem like a game you take time off work to play…… jkjk! Not an option for me, BUT, I have secured starting on September 1st, every evening that entire week after putting the little one down for the night! 

I voted Crimson Fleet because I will be doing every act of piracy the game has to offer 😈

I'm liking both the Star Trek-ness of the United Colonies and the Firefly-ness of the Freestar Collective, seeing as I'm a fan of both of those tv shows. I almost exclusively play "good" characters in games because I'm just too nice of a guy in real life to do any truly bad things even in a video game (for instance across all of my playthroughs of KOTOR 1 and 2 I only played Revan and Meetra as Jedi, never Sith, and when I played Sith Empire characters in SWTOR I played them going for light side points only, about the darkest thing I do in video games is pickpocketing and lockpick thievery in TES and Fallout), so I can't see myself ever aligning with the space pirates of the Crimson Fleet. Not really a big fan of working for a mega-corporation either, so doubt I will do a playthrough where I side with Ryujin Industries.

But I'm going with Freestar on playthrough #1, so that is what I voted.

I ain't no corpo bitch that's for sure.