Starfield’s Premium Edition gets discounted to $70, which basically makes the Shattered Space DLC free before it even launches

The Premium Edition of Starfield has been given a 30% discount on Steam, dropping the price to $69.99, the same price as the base game at launch. The deal is good until July 11.

Although it’s admittedly a slightly cynical take, it’s also quite true that this Starfield Premium Edition discount essentially makes the to-be-released Shattered Space DLC, which is included in the package, free, since you’d pay the same price at retail for the standard edition of the game that doesn’t include the expansion. Granted, I’m not seeing this discount anywhere except Steam, so this need not apply if you’re playing on console or the Xbox PC launcher.

A less cynical way to put this is: this is a really good deal if you don’t already own Starfield and don’t have a subscription to Game Pass where it’s available free to subscribers. Despite the lukewarm reception relative to other mainline Bethesda launches, there’s a fair bit of hype around Shattered Space, so it’s not a bad time to hop aboard if you’ve been on the fence.

Director Todd Howard recently shared his insight into the scope of the Shattered Space DLC and what players can expect from the new content, and he directly compared it to Fallout 4’s Far Harbor expansion. Because “the bulk” of the DLC will take place within an entirely new area built just for the DLC, Bethesda has been afforded the opportunity to take a more traditional approach to environment crafting.

“It allows us to build a landscape like we would traditionally do, and have the city and the quest,” he said. “And so, that story takes place there, and the landscape’s kind of… content-wise we’re looking at kind of like what we did with Far Harbor on Fallout 4, where like, okay, this is a scope that works for our development in doing this kind of annual story expansion type of thing.”

Shattered Space is due out sometime this year.

In the meantime, find out where Starfield ranked on our list of the best Xbox Series X games to play today.