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.
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.
