For the last month or so the hype surrounding Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has been astonishing, now that the game has arrived there are some minor issues, but on the whole it looks like yet another success story for Bethesda Softworks – today we finally have some details regarding sales figures.
According to VGCharts within two days of its release over 3.4 million copies of the game were sold and this doesn’t even take into account digital sales. The most popular platform was the Xbox 360 which saw 59% of these sales (Siri tells me this equates to just over 2 million copies), whilst the PS3 made up for 27% (roughly 918,000 copies) and the PC accounted for the remaining 14% (~476,000 copies).
Bethesda’s last Elder Scrolls title, Oblivion, sold 490k copies of the game during the same time frame when it was released back in 2006, however it is worth noting that the consumer base was far smaller back then – the Xbox 360 was still shy of being six months old and the PS3 was just a pipe dream.
When you compare 48 hour sales of Skyrim with Oblivion it shows a growth of over 600% (even when ignoring digital sales), this seriously makes us wonder why people are still claiming that piracy is killing game developers, but that’s another debate…
We were really surprised by just how many people favored the 360 version of the game over its competitors, however in this day and age it would be no surprise to see Steam sales alone overshadow today’s retail sales figures – what do you think?
Other figures suggest that Skyrim is currently on par with Battefield 3’s first week sales and has already overtaken FIFA 12, in fact the only game which it lags behind is Modern Warfare 3 – but to see an RPG holding its own against first-person shooters and popular sports titles is truly amazing and sets a new benchmark for role-playing games to follow.
Is Skyrim everything you expected it would be?
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