Skyrim: 3.4 million units sold

David Kenkel 14 Nov, 2011 at 1:17pm ET Article published in Gaming

Our friends over at VGChartz are reporting at least 3.4 million units of Skyrim …an RPG, have been sold so far. Might be worth mentioning that 3.4 million does not include digital copies of the game sold, this is just physical units. The sales numbers break out as follows:

XBox 360: 2,000,000 copies
PS3: 900,000 copies
PC: 475,000 copies

The PC sales number is a bit disingenuous, though, due to physical-only copies being sold. I’d like to think digital sales at least match the physical copies of the game, but with the preorder and collector’s edition specials that were offered for the hardcore fans it likely isn’t the case. If you took a conservative estimate of half the PC sales being digital, the total units moved is closer to 3.7 million within the first two days. Very impressive numbers, beating out my beloved FIFA12 sales (which is a wildly popular worldwide release) and on par with Battlefield 3.

Icrontic has certainly been having a good time with Skyrim. The number of Skyrim-centric conversations in our forums were high enough to justify a dedicated Elder Scrolls forum; people who participate in Elder Scrolls conversations get a new Icrontic Achievement as well.

Skyrim is available now for PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3.

Comments

14 Nov 2011 ~ 1:26pm Grant Sales doesn't mean everything, and I'm talking to you, Call of Duty.
14 Nov 2011 ~ 1:29pm Koreish It's still impressive that in the day of FPS games that an RPG can match the Sales of Battlefield and rapidly approach MW3.
14 Nov 2011 ~ 2:11pm Thrax There were 275,000 concurrent players on Steam playing Skyrim at one point. I imagine the actual number of owners is north of a half million, bringing the PC total in line with consoles.

Also, LOL PS3.
14 Nov 2011 ~ 2:57pm QuadWhore I can only imagine the number of stolen copies. God, this game is good.
14 Nov 2011 ~ 3:28pm NiGHTS

Thrax wrote:

There were 275,000 concurrent players on Steam playing Skyrim at one point. I imagine the actual number of owners is north of a half million, bringing the PC total in line with consoles.

Also, LOL PS3.

The only thing that prevented me from making this point was that, being a steamworks game, it would be hard to get a clean look at the numbers. A store bought copy would look the same as a digital one at that point, no?
14 Nov 2011 ~ 3:52pm Ilriyas Two words Jesus Christ.

I mean I knew that Skyrim would sell like crazy I mean Elder Scrolls is one of the most popular (possibly THE most popular) RPG series of all time but I wasn't expecting anywhere near 3 and a half million I was expecting a million, maybe a million and a half but this is insane.

Perhaps the sales will convince Bethesda to make some feature length DLCs.
14 Nov 2011 ~ 8:37pm serfin' ceorl That's a lot of units. It is a well done game and it's one of the best examples of an RPG ever made. It's taken some of the best aspects from all the best rpg's ever made and combined them into one game. Its more evolutionary than revolutionary but done well. I'm 34 years old, been playing RPG's since Adventure on the Atari (arguably the first RPG video game) and I bought Skyrim.
15 Nov 2011 ~ 3:57pm Steve Even people that purchase the game via Steam, don't necessarily play via Steam as each time you load the game via Steam it re-writes the ini file, putting a lot of settings back to default.
15 Nov 2011 ~ 3:59pm Snarkasm Haven't heard of that, and doesn't do it to me. Any source links?
15 Nov 2011 ~ 5:09pm NiGHTS I've no links, but I've read about this in /r/skyrim, FWIW.