Starfield delayed following Xbox's encouragement

Xbox apparently encouraged Bethesda to push back the release of Starfield, which was originally planned to release a year early.

There’s no denying that Starfield is a very important game for Xbox. Despite its popularity, the Xbox brand has always seemed to lag behind its rival, PlayStation, even admitting that it lost the great console war.

Take a look at Starfield’s gameplay in the video below

Starfield is an opportunity for Xbox to prove it can match the standard PlayStation have set when it comes to exclusives and I’d argue it’s vital for the company’s success that the game lives up to the hype, especially since they dropped a pretty penny acquiring Bethesda to make it happen.

Therefore, it’s not a surprise to learn Xbox has had a lot of involvement in the game’s development, supposedly urging Bethesda to delay its release by a year to ensure it's finished, a decision heavily praised by fans. This information came from the Head of Xbox himself, Phil Spencer, who recently spoke on the Giant Bomb podcast about the game’s acquisition.

Spencer said: "Truth be told, when the acquisition closed this game had a significantly earlier ship date than where we're actually launching in” and went on to say they spoke with the Starfield team in the hopes of giving them "the time" to finish the game.

While it was probably a difficult decision to make, there’s no doubt it was the right one, after all, there’s a saying in the games industry that a delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad. Nintendo recently followed this philosophy with their big 2023 launch, Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which reportedly used a full year to fix and perfect features in the game.

I think we all know what Bethesda games are like when it comes to bugs and performance issues, and given the ridiculous amount of hype surrounding Starfield, the game will need to be near-perfect if it wants to live up to people’s expectations. Thankfully, Xbox has apparently been assisting Starfield’s team with quality assurance, claiming the game will have very few bugs compared to previous Bethesda games.

There’s not long left to wait until we can finally get our hands on what many believe will be a Game Of The Year contender. The pressure is certainly building, especially since many fans are buying Xbox consoles for the very first time just to play the game, and many more are planning to take the week off work to sink as many hours as they can into Starfield’s vast galaxy.

Starfield will launch on the 6th of September later this year, exclusively for the Xbox Series X/S and PC.