So in early March of 2025, the official Twitter (I refused to call it “X”) account for “Starfield” made the following post:
As you can see, that was over nine months ago, and 2025 is nearly over. The last real venue from which Bethesda could have made an announcement regarding “Starfield” and hoped to get a lot of media attention would have been at The Game Awards, earlier this week.
Alas, they did not make such an announcement. They did show the majority of games under BGS’ umbrella, including “The Elder Scrolls” and “Fallout series”… But they failed to acknowledge that “Starfield” even exists.
That, my friends, is bad news.
Now that alone doesn’t mean that all is lost, and “Starfield” has been abandoned. Xbox often does a Showcase event in January, and they very well could be saving any news for “Starfield” for it. But let’s look at things from a realistic point of view, shall we?
Before “Starfield” was released, Todd Howard (Game Director) stated they would be releasing annual DLC for the game after release, and they made a good start with that by releasing the “Shattered Space” DLC just over a year after “Starfield” came out. We have also gotten a few content updates since release, but mostly bugfixes, and a handful of official Mods for the game.
But in 2025, since that announcement shown above, BGS has put out zero content updates or official Mods for the game. Nine months with no support except for what the modding community has provided. I’m fine with those unofficial mods, but it still isn’t official support from Bethesda. All we’ve had is a teaser trailer around the 2nd anniversary for the game, which raised a lot of hype for what is to come, but also raised expectations for what we should expect in 2025.
Now I know there are going to be people twisting the March announcement, saying that “when BGS said a year, they meant one calendar year, so you need to give them more time!”
The problem with that is inevitably, when BGS still doesn’t make any statements or release any content before early March 2026, those same folks will say we still need to be patient, and give BGS more slack. Then next summer those folks will say we should be happy to have what content BGS has already provided for the game.
… and so it goes.
Now before anyone gets the wrong idea, I am a huge fan of “Starfield”, and Bethesda in general. I play “Starfield” every week, and have since it launched in 2023. I am not some random “hater” just complaining about the game, just to complain. In fact, if Bethesda were to announce today that they were ceasing all further content updates for the game, and would only be providing bugfixes and support for the Creations store, I wouldn’t like that, but I would accept it.
So why am I unhappy that Bethesda hasn’t made any statements or released any content in nine months? Just that… They haven’t communicated with us, the fans.
Now I get it. I’ve been commenting on games for a quarter of a century on various platforms (videos, blogs, livestreams, and even a webcomic), so I know one thing to be true: Game companies hate to give bad news to their fans. I’m sure that when they made that Tweet back in March about their big plans for this year, they absolutely meant to follow through and provide something really awesome.
But plans change, delays happen, and suddenly they aren’t able to live up to the company’s previous announcements. That’s fine, of course. The problem is, when this inevitably happens (I covered MMORPGs like “World of Warcraft” for over a decade, where this happens all the time), the company never wants to tell the fans the bad news.
They think it will dampen sales, or cause fans to quit the game.
Those companies, including Bethesda, are wrong.
Fans just want to be treated like adults, and receive communication from the video game companies they are doing business with. Whether it is good news or bad news, we deserve to know what is going on, since our money and support is what is primarily keeping these games alive… especially for games like “Starfield”.
In the end, fans of “Starfield” will continue to be fans, regardless of what the future holds for the game. But the longer Bethesda delays in releasing news or new content for the game, the more we have to assume that the future for the game is bleak, indeed.
