Starbound

Each in the currency that store quoted — not converted: the gap between two rows is the publisher's pricing, not an exchange rate.

Every market we collect.

Reviews, worldwide (the counter carries no country): 5975.67/day in the week to Jul 17 → 13.29/day in the week after.

For scale, across Steam · Top Sellers · Brazil over the last 30 days: the 26 chart moves that followed a price cut of more than 20% went a median of 7 places towards #1, and the 2,400 moves with no price cut behind them went 2 away. One store, one chart, one country — it is the only place we have enough observations to say even that.

Prices outside the United States have been collected since 6 August 2026 and chart positions since 19 July 2026, so a cut older than that has no market to compare and a market that joined later has no history yet. Nothing here is converted between currencies.

Matched by title — a reused name can pair the wrong games. * is a critic aggregate. Prices and positions are each store's United States storefront; Epic charts worldwide. Audience and Score too, except Steam's, which is worldwide.

Hours played at review time, across 1K reviews with recorded playtime.

positive critical· bar length = how often the theme comes up

After 6-ish years of not playing, I decided to give Starbound a revisit as part of a personal "research" project. I even took notes and everything. My goal was to reflect on the games that made me want to make games, and Starbound was the first on my list. Almost all of my notes were complaints. The first conclusion I came to is that Chucklefish doesn't know how to make their players' time feel rewarding. An example that every Starbound player will know is that there's TOO. MANY. CONTAINERS. If you haven't played, that'll sound counterintuitive. (like a lot of things in this game tbh) Aren't boxes full of free stuff normally a GOOD thing? The crates in Starbound are full of useless items. Normally that would mean you could just ignore them, but from time to time they also contain items that are critical for progression, like weapons and manipulator modules. Loot isn't separated from junk, so you'll constantly be digging through a million crates hoping to get something useful. Crafting progression is like any other game, you mine ore to progress yourself through "tiers", with each different metal only spawning on planets with specific biomes. As planets grow more dangerous, they require higher and higher tier protection, crafted using materials from the previous tier. It's perfectly straightforward and is one of the few mechanics in this game that makes sense. But the biomes progress linearly. It's essentially impossible to skip a tier, and every time you move on to the next level, your ass is going back down in the mines again. You end up doing this 6 times at minimum. Everything feels the same, wherever you go. Starbound relies HEAVILY on RNG, and it's RNG that's not even that good. Once you've seen every biome, you've seen every planet. There's no meaningful difference between them. Its randomly generated weapons work the same way. The only real difference between weapons within the same class are damage type and secondary attack. Planets are the same. Weapons are the same. Special abilities are the same. The postgame suffers from yet another problem, and that's that it's an endless grind. Defeating the final boss unlocks dungeons called "Ancient Vaults", that you can grind repeatedly. The main reward from doing so are weapon enhancements (that only upgrade the damage) and terraformers you can use to change the biome of a planet. It requires at least two runs of the dungeon to craft each terraformer, and multiple more to run it. Each run of the dungeon requires you to buy a key with end-game materials. So in all likelihood you're gonna end up back in the mines a few more times. Aside from not feeling rewarding, a lot of things in this game weren't thought through or just don't make sense. There are space stations called "Weapon trading stations". They don't sell usable weapons. You can tame wild creatures as combat pets. They still take contact damage, and primarily attack with melee, so they just end up charging in and immediately dying. And they remain dead until you get a late-game crafting station to revive them. Your environmental resistance is controlled by a backpack slot item called an EPP, and you lose all protection when it's unequipped. In previous updates, it was an "implant" that didn't take up inventory space. There are items still in the game that are completely vestigial. For example, there's a backpack slot item that provides light. It immediately becomes useless once you craft your EPP. There's no reason to take the EPP off, and it can be upgraded to provide light anyway. I understand that this review does basically nothing. Starbound's time in the sun ended years ago. I have a feeling that all of its remaining players are in it for the nostalgia like I was, or playing heavily modded so that the problems with the vanilla game were fixed by someone else.