Starfield preload begins on August 9, Amazon listing suggests

It seems like you’ll have a long time to download the title

Marco Wutz | Aug 7, 2023

Starfield preload begins on August 9, Amazon listing suggests /

It seems like the Starfield preload begins on August 9, 2023, almost a month ahead of release on September 6. This is suggested by an Amazon listing for a bundle containing a 1TB Xbox Series S and the upcoming space RPG spotted on ResetEra. However, it’s still unclear if this offer only exists for Xbox Series X|S or if the PC version of the game will be up for preload then as well.

There is no precise start time for the preload either, but with almost a month until release that’s a rather secondary piece of information anyway – being a few hours late to the preload party won’t mean the difference between life or death with such a long preload period.

Starfield screenshot — It looks like you can download Starfield starting on August 9, 2023 / Bethesda

Giving players almost a month to download the game is unusually generous, although it leaves little room for last-minute changes – that makes it likely that we’ll see a beefy launch day patch, in which case players need to expect a juicy download anyways.

At least we’ll know the rough download size of the final product thanks to this move early on, so anyone with storage problems can deal with those ahead of release.

This may also be a little PR play: Recently released CRPG hit Baldur’s Gate 3 could not offer a preload despite it being heavily requested due to already being out in Early Access on Steam and the platform not supporting preload in that case, so Microsoft might be getting a bit cheeky by offering a very long download window ahead of release.

Baldur’s Gate 3 was initially planned to be released closer to Starfield, but moved its launch up by a month. The PS5 version on the other hand is scheduled to launch on September 6, 2023, the same day as Bethesda’s game, and is currently on top of the PSN pre-order charts.

Starfield recently announced AMD as its GPU partner and Bethesda confirmed that the Standard Edition would come with a physical copy of the game.

Published Aug 7, 2023

MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg