Starfield Players Surprised by Long Wait Times to Play

Some Starfield players are having to wait in long queues before playing.

By Tanner Dedmon

Between the Xbox and PC, Xbox Game Pass, and Xbox Cloud Gaming, Starfield players have several options to play the game, but if you're playing Bethesda's RPG via the Cloud Gaming option, you may be surprised to find that you sometimes have to wait to play the game. That may end up being especially true over the next day or so since this is the first full weekend that players have had with the game since Starfield released on September 6th, so if you're a Cloud Gaming user, expect to potentially be put in a queue before you play.

Those wait times are variable and depend on how many people are trying to play the game at the time via Cloud Gaming as well as any number of other factors not immediately known to players, but some are seeing wait times much longer than one might've expected.

Wait Times to Play Starfield

This situation obviously doesn't apply to those who are playing the game on a console, PC, or through Xbox Game Pass, but many who are playing through Cloud Gaming seem to be encountering wait times during busy intervals of around 15 minutes. Annoying, sure, but not an especially disruptive wait time for a game that you get to play on-the-go on any device that'll support Cloud Gaming without having the hassle of downloading it to a device.

However, 15 minutes seems to be on the shorter side when talking about the wait times that some players are encountering. Over in the subreddit for Xbox Cloud Gaming, people playing that way have been one-upping each other by sharing what their wait times look like. Some people have said that they've had to wait a bit longer than 15 minutes and have gotten wait times of around 25 minutes instead, but even that's not as bad as others who've had to wait a very specific and much longer period like 245 minutes before they can play. It's become a competition of sorts over there for players who are sharing their longest wait times.

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The wait times naturally stem from the fact that you're calling upon the cloud version of Starfield at the same time that many others are similar to when everyone's trying to get into an MMO at the same time, but the problem isn't just limited to Starfield either. It's affecting Xbox Cloud Gaming services overall, and even those who are trying to play other games like Sea of Thieves are also finding themselves waiting in a queue.

While frustrating, this sort of thing tends to happen whenever a game as noteworthy as Starfield comes to the Xbox Cloud Gaming service. It happened months ago, for example, whenever Grand Theft Auto 5 came back to Xbox Game Pass. Queue times aren't nonexistent overall and may happen even if there's not some big new release that everyone's trying to play, too, so if you're big on Xbox Cloud Gaming in general, these wait times are just a slightly bigger bump in the road than usual.

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