Contrary to the dates leaked by retailers, Bethesda announced the dates when players can start their preload of Starfield on Xbox and PC, less than a month before its release date.

In an official tweet from Bethesda Game Studios' Twitter account, they first announced that Starfield had “gone gold.” What this means in the gaming industry is that the game is now complete and ready for release. As such, Bethesda announced in the same tweet just when players will be able to preload their game.

For the players who pre-ordered their game on Xbox Series X|S, players can start preloading their game on August 17, 2023. That's tomorrow as of this article. For PC players, on the other hand, players can start their Starfield preload on August 30, 2023. That's a week before the game's release date on September 6, 2023.

Rumors over the game's preload date started back in early August. At the time, a shop page for an Xbox Series X and Starfield bundle went live. Under the details for the bundle, it stated the following:

Pre-load after 08/09/2023. Game will be playable after 09/06/2023.

Players took this to mean that the preload will happen at around August 9, 2023. However, it seems that that information was wrong. Well, it was technically correct, as August 17 and August 30 does come after August 9.

In any case, players can expect the preload size to be around 125GB on PC. This is based on the game's system requirements on PC. For the console, on the other hand, it might be a bit bigger, as is normally the case for games released on multiple platforms. Either way, as the release date is still pretty far off, players can opt not to preload it yet until around a week or so before the game's release.

Players can pre-order three versions of the game. There's the Standard Edition ($69.99), which just gives players the base game. There's the Digital Premium Edition ($99.99), which gives players the base game, a story expansion, five days of early access, a skin pack, and access to the artbook and sound track. Finally, there's the Constellation edition ($300), which contains everything in the Digital Premium edition, as well as some physical goods.

That's all the information we have about Starfield's preload date, a few weeks before its release date. Check out our gaming news articles for the latest in gaming news.