Sales of SKYRIM pass 60 million copies

Bethesda Games Studios director Todd Howard has indicated that The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has passed 60 million copies sold. The news comes a few weeks after CD Projekt Red confirmed their similarly open-world mega-RPG The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt has passed 50 million copies sold.

This would make Skyrim the seventh-biggest-selling video game of all time, and would drop The Witcher 3 down to a still-very-respectable joint-tenth (with rough sales parity with Blizzard's Overwatch). Ahead of Skyrim are Minecraft (238 million sales), Grand Theft Auto V/Grand Theft Auto Online (180 million), Tetris (100 million), Wii Sports (82 million), PUBG: Battlegrounds (75 million), Mario Kart 8 (62 million) and Super Mario Bros. (58 million). Note these lists do not include free-to-play games like World of WarCraft and Fortnite, which both have conservative estimates of at least 100 million players apiece since their respective launches.

Launched in 2011, the game casts players into the northern, subarctic province of Skyrim, part of the Empire of Tamriel, where they have to deal with a civil war, an invasion of dragons, stirring undead in ancient ruins and the vagaries of the weather. The game was enhanced with several expansions (Hearthstone, Dawnguard and Dragonborn) and has since been re-released twice with upgraded graphics and features, as well as being ported across three generations of video game consoles and PCs, with re-releases and ports becoming so commonplace that it became a meme that even the developers commented on.

Skyrim is the fifth game in the Elder Scrolls fantasy series, which also consists of Arena (1994), Daggerfall (1997), Morrowind (2002), Oblivion (2006) and spin-off games Battlespire (1997), Redguard (1998) and The Elder Scrolls Online (2014). Oblivion is currently getting a fan-led remaster called Skyblivion, with a planned release date of 2025. The Elder Scrolls VI is currently in pre-production, and the hope it will be out before the end of this decade.

Bethesda are also the studio behind the Fallout post-apocalyptic series, having developed Fallout 3 (2008), Fallout 4 (2015) and Fallout 76 (2018), as well as publishing Obsidian Entertainment's Fallout: New Vegas (2010). Bethesda's next game is the science fiction epic Starfield, which is due for release on 6 September this year.