Fun fact about a 8 hour video, right now 111k views, if we assume all 111k viewers watched all 8.5 hours (i know, not likely but easy math.) Thats 109 years of human time spent watching this video... thats about 2 normal human lifespans!

Luke does take time to talk about the creation club and official $7 mods being a bad value for money, and dwarfed by the size and quality of cheaper $5 community created mods.... I think that is deliberate, its a form of sales pricing strategy. You anchor a bad value that nobody would take, to make the middle priced thing seem like a really good value, to encourage volume of sales. If MS is taking a 75% cut for community mods in the creation club for starfield.. Selling a bunch of those $5 community mods is a massive win for them, even if it does require they release expensive and poor value official mods to make them look like a good deal.

I love the long history of todd howards motivations!

https://steamdb.info/app/1716740/charts/

7k active players right now

I think at this point, it must be profitable, though getting actual figures is not available. at 8 hours and 27 minutes its discussed that Todd said the average (mean?) hours played for starfield is 40 hours, thats huge.

The outstanding question is if Starfield is the launching point of a new franchise? Even if the answer is yes, I think we have Elder Scrolls 6, then Fallout 5, each of which is 5 years... so 10 years before we could see Starfield 2. That might be a big ask for fans, but on the other hand, for people who played but didn't fall in love, it might be just enough time to be nostalgic and make the criticisms fuzzy and forgotten.

Personally I think nothing but love was poured into Starfield, and the fact they have fans/critics willing to spend 8.5 hours to evaluate it, means there is still a ton of love in the community. People seem to be frustrated by what it could have been, vs what it was compared to other "modern" alternative titles. I think this tremendous deep dive was extremely illustrative of how Todd and company maneuvered into the current position and design philosophies, as well as the sales reality of creating a ton of recurring revenue for the MS/Zeni buyout. Every single step makes sense.

The opening video loading screen with the hard disk pause... chefs kiss, beautifully done.