[bisby]

~8 million downloads (and thats assuming duplicates don't get recounted?), vs 60 million copies sold [1] is still barely ~15%. This might mean that for PC, its more like 8 million out of 16 million and 50% of PC players are modding.

So in a best case, it's 50% of PC players (which may apply to steam deck), or worst case, less than 15% of all players (which may also apply to steam deck).

[1] - https://www.gamesradar.com/skyrim-has-sold-60-million-copies...

[somenameforme]

It didn't sell anywhere remotely near 60 million. That was an offhand comment from Todd Howard who was being a bit misleading. He was mixing all the different versions of Skyrim (Skyrim, Skyrim VR, Skyrim Special Edition) and calling them simply Skyrim as a whole. It's like saying "Mario" has sold a billion copies. If you're not familiar with the series, those aren't like 'game of the year' type collections, but distinct incompatible binaries. Each has their own incompatible mods.

I'm only talking about "Skyrim", the original game. It sold in the ballpark of ~25 million, with a probable plurality on PC - so somewhere in the ballpark of 10 million there. And no, like I mentioned, the download numbers are unique users - not total downloads. The total modding userbase is also going to be well upwards of 8 million. There are lots of reasonably sized non-English Skyrim modding sites also hosting SkyUI, and there's probably at least a small number of modders that have never installed that specific mod.

[goosedragons]

Most of the sales of the "original" Skyrim were on Xbox 360 if sources are to be believed, Wikipedia has the 360 version as selling 13.7 million put of 23. And the PS3 version may have even outsold PC. Obviously anecdotal but that's where most of my friend base played it too.

[somenameforme]

I think it's fairly safe to say that those numbers are unlikely. One of the only real specific, and accurate, figures we can rely on is Bethesda in late 2011 saying they'd shipped (not sold) 10 million copies to retail (which excludes PC). In 2013 they stated that 20 million copies had been sold (which would include PC). The two notes I'd add here is that they never gave anymore shipped numbers, which means they probably never broke another meaningful benchmark on it, and that console titles (with very few exceptions) are overwhelmingly front loaded in sales.

I'm quite confident on the PC sales, because there's an oddly consistent little metric. For games that sell beyond a minimum amount, about 1 in 60 players tends to leave a written review. So total sales tends to be in the ballpark of written_reviews * 60. For Skyrim, that's 180,000 reviews or 10.8 million sales [1]. Linked because the game's been unlisted since the Special Edition came out. That metric also matches the mod count near perfectly, as well as Bethesda's sales announcements, and also their behaviors like trying to do things like create 'paid mods' (and the predictable backlash it entailed). So I'd estimate reasonable figures would be around 10 million on the PC, and a 2:1 360:PS3 ratio for the remainder. So you end up with somewhere around 10 million, 7 million, 4 million, with a variance probably in the range of something like 30%.

[1] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/72850/The_Elder_Scrolls_V...