Starfield has lost 97% of its Steam players in less than six months

Skyrim is 13 years old and has many more players. It says "Starfield was not a return to form for Bethesda."

Is it something to do with modding-community?

If that generates a load of free cool stuff people may play more for longer.

The main IP rights owner probably doesn't really want this, they want to develop and sell a new game or expansion.
- The main IP rights holder for Star field is the same as that of Skyrim (aka: Bethesda)
- The IP holder at this point is Microsoft, so who knows. Microsoft has bought up a lot of big gaming outfits recently, so this is kind of new territory.
- I'm waiting on more world shit mods to play it again, recently saw a house building mod on any planet and have my hopes up more will come. Granted Bethesda might actually want this engagement so they can release a definitive edition with hella mods, to bridge their own technical gaps again lol.
Vanilla Skyrim < Vanilla Starfield

Modded Skyrim >>> Vanilla Starfield

Simple as. I went back and replayed Vanilla Skyrim this year, and let me be the first to tell you that Starfield is legitimately a better game when it comes to roleplaying, choices, and quest design. Skyrim has a far more interactive and immersive world design, but to me that falls flat when the game is so fucking boring to interact with (hot take, I know).

Mods fix all of those problems with Skyrim, and that's what people are playing now.

I thought replayability was sort of Bethsoft's MO?

I dunno, I played Skyrim through once, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of replay value to me.

It's very long, and you can do everything in one playthrough. The only difference is which army you want to win, and you make that choice right at the end.

You can even take control of the magic guild even though you know no magic. I honestly don't know what other people see in it. Modding maybe? Not something that interests me. New Vegas was a lot more interesting.
- Yeah I never valued skyrim for replayability... I replayed oblivion a lot (maybe because I was younger), and replayed FO3/NV a bit. But even with mods, I could never get myself to replay skyrim more than a couple hours in.
  
  Just felt so repetitive with boring dungeons and drauger. Stumbling into Blackreach was one of my favorite Bethesda experiences tho. But the gameplay felt stale halfway through my first playthrough. Felt like a chore to finish the story.
- I honestly don't know what other people see in it. Modding maybe?
  
  Pretty much. Bethesda's RPGs live and die by their mod support.
- I liked living Skyrim 4 from wabbajack but yeah the base game isn't really that special and I haven't replayed it without mods
  
  I replayed Vanilla Skyrim this year, and yea, it's boring as hell. Better world design than Starfield, but Starfield is overall a better game when it comes to roleplaying and quest design, in Vanilla.
- Skyrim's true power is that it's excellent for single-player roleplay. The game is very immersive, the universe feels extremely vast, and the gameplay allows for extremely varied play styles.
  
  The end result is that the game is very replayable if your thing is building a consistent and unique (head)cannon for your character. If you don't focus the main quest, you can put in hundreds of hours across multiple characters before things get stale. Even the quests that you follow multiple times, you might approach from very different angles.
  
  It's really not good for roleplaying, though. The game doesn't give the player much to work with when it comes to creating unique characters, it's more like a demigod simulator. Mods fix this, but New Vegas still stomps it because the game and the quest design facilitates roleplaying better.
- Modding for me. Whenever I've loaded it up again, it's been with immersion mods that make stuff like weather exposure, food, and travelling things you have to manage. It's a different game and you do things differently, like, you're not getting to High Hrothgar until you hunt some furs to wear and have a good tent to shelter from blizzards on the way up. Many mods also bring in entirely new content.
  
  New Vegas was definitely a treat, though. I found Fallout 3 quite mediocre and never ended up finishing it. Skyrim sort of falls in the middle there somewhere.
The opposite, actually. Bethesda goes for infinite playability, rather than infinite replayability. New Vegas is far more replayable than anything Bethesda has released.

It's not really a great sign for the developers if their game doesn't have a ton of replay value I imagine. Consider Skyrim, it's the same general type of game, but people play that game over and over and make modifications to it to keep it fresh and enjoyable even now, and as a result Bethesda has been able to resell it for other platforms or with extra content or related merch for years, because people like it enough to keep coming back. If Starfield isn't managing the same despite being the same sort of game from the same company, then that both serves as a warning to those who haven't gotten it yet that the game probably isn't as enjoyable by comparison, and also doesn't give the devs as much incentive to keep making any improvements to it.

I mean, Harry Potter was the biggest selling game last year, and that has also lost 97% of it's players.

Not everything is meant to be played forever. I think Skyrim was a one-off tbh.
- That’s another exceptionally boring game, though.
  
  Just checking some random games:
  
  Sekiro is currently sitting at 92% players lost from its peak after five years
  
  Spiritfarer is at 80%
  
  Hollow Knight has only lost 63% of players
  
  Witcher 3 also lost 80%, and actually has a larger active player base (in number of players, not proportionally) right at this moment than HL, despite being years older and peaking significantly lower
  
  Big tentpole releases are likely to have a higher peak though, just for the week one FOMO.
  
  Not defending Starfield because by all accounts it is exceptionally average in all areas, just that losing a lot of players from peak is not particularly unexpected.
  
  Kind of feel sorry for those that paid for it on Steam, because it's the very poster child for a trial month of GamePass.
  
  Witcher 3 had a pretty big update not too long ago though
  
  There hasn’t really been a single point since the game released almost nine years ago where its player count has dropped below current levels (20-40k active players). There was a huge boost with the update but it’s back to normal levels now. Can check steamdb for yourself to confirm
Starfield was very bland and had very limited dialogue/storyline in comparison to skyrim, but skyrim was so repetitive and boring with so much of the game being spent in similar looking dungeons fighting drauger...

Even with mods, I never made it through a second playthrough because the gameplay just fizzled with the boring dungeon-crawling required for so many questlines/words of power.

At least in oblivion, most of the caves/oblivion gates were totally optional. So much of skyrim is spent in boring ass dungeons...

This isn't an argument for Starfield replayability tho. Starfield doesn't have enough storyline for much replayability. Felt so bare bones in comparison to skyrim or any other Bethesda game.

I mostly agree, but I can guess one reason why it's useful. With a game that's not that old, but well received, I'd expect new players to keep coming in for a while. Not to the degree of when it first came out, but someone like me will wishlist a game and wait until there's a sale or I have time to play it to buy and play. If the drop off is huge, and sales don't help much, it does reflect on the game somewhat.

Yeah, this headline reads "disappointing single player game somehow stopped selling all that much after 6 months"

Like... Yeah???

I'm supposed to move on?