Bethesda Fires Back At Starfield Complaints On Steam As Game Goes On Sale

Bethesda is defending Starfield, its latest role-playing game 25 years in the making, from negative comments on the game’s Steam page. Starfield is currently on sale, bringing in a new batch of gamers with opinions that Bethesda feels they need to respond to. As of this article going live, the game has an overall review sentiment of “Mixed” from players on Steam.

These developer responses to negative reviews aren’t new, however. Scrolling through the review section of the Starfield page it’s easy to spot that this has been happening for a while. For example, on November 9th the developer responded to a player’s negative review with “Thank you for taking the time to provide your review and we are sorry to hear that you were disappointed with encountering many loading screens while playing.

While there may be loading screens in between fast traveling, just consider the amount of data for the expansive gameplay that is procedurally generated to load flawlessly in under 3 seconds. We believe that shortcoming will not hinder our players from getting lost in the world we created.”


It’s very strange, almost unhinged, to see a developer respond to a player’s criticism this way. Basically, admitting that the player’s point of view is valid while deflecting it by pointing out how technically impressive the game is from the developer’s point of view.

While it’s understandable that the folks at Bethesda are very proud of the game world they built with Starfield, seeing it take the time to respond to individuals leaving their opinions on Steam is odd. The time and energy writing these responses are surely better spent elsewhere.