There’s life in the old dog yet. Despite The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim having presumably been played by every living human at this point, a 90% off deal has made the 13-year-old role-playing game one of the most-played games on Steam once more.
The deal reduced the price of Skyrim’s updated Special Edition to just $3.99. At time of writing, there are still a few hours to pick it up at that price — the deal ends at 1 p.m. EST on Monday.
Cue a whole new audience discovering Bethesda’s classic fantasy RPG for the first time — or, perhaps, a large number of Skyrim veterans spending a January weekend wallowing in nostalgia. On Sunday, Skyrim peaked at 67,622 concurrent players on Steam. That made it the 28th most-played game on Steam in the past 24-hour period, just behind Helldivers 2, DayZ, and new release Dynasty Warriors: Origins, and just ahead of Steam stalwarts Warframe and Euro Truck Simulator 2.
That number of players is only just short of the Special Edition’s all-time record of 69,906 concurrent players, recorded on its 2016 launch. It’s a way below the numbers recorded by the original version of Skyrim, though, which debuted to a peak of 287,411 players back in November 2011.
It’s worth noting, however, that this isn’t some phoenix-rising-from-the-ashes moment. At any given moment, someone, somewhere is playing Skyrim. Quite a lot of someones, in fact. The Special Edition has rarely seen a monthly peak of fewer than 25,000 Steam players since the start of 2020. And, if anything, its player numbers have been trending upward. Skyrim is one of gaming’s great perennials.
This might partly be due to the continuing non-existence of The Elder Scrolls 6, which Bethesda announced over six years ago, and which is still unlikely to arrive in a hurry. But Skyrim may soon have in-house competition from an older sibling. Leaks suggest a remake of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion is inbound, perhaps as soon as this year.
