Skyrim has sold 60 million copies, making it the seventh best-selling game ever

Skyrim has sold more than 60 million copies, making it the seventh best-selling video game of all time.

Speaking during an IGN interview, Skyrim game director Todd Howard was asked about how many of Starfield 1,000 planets that game's main story might push players towards. In the course of his response - which focused on the idea that we'd see only a "small fraction" of the galaxy through that quest - Howard noted that "we're sitting here, it's 12 years after Skyrim, we're looking at a game that has over 60 million copies [sold]."

That figure means that Skyrim is the seventh best-selling game of all time, sitting just ahead of 1985's Super Mario Bros and just behind Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. It also means that the game has sold 30 million copies in the last seven years - as of 2016 Skyrim had shifted 30 million units, so it's doubled that count since then. That was likely helped along by 2021's Anniversary Edition, which offered an additional suite of content to the game, although Bethesda has never directly acknowledged how that version of the game performed. Nintendo Switch and VR versions, released in 2017 and 2018 respectively, are also likely to have bumped that sales title up significantly.

For those wondering, the best-selling game of all time in Minecraft at 238 million, followed by GTA, Tetris, Wii Sports, PUBG, Mario Kart 8, Skyrim, Super Mario Bros, and Red Dead Redemption 2, with The Witcher 3 and Overwatch rounding out the top ten with 50 million copies sold each.

If you want to keep up with everything we know about 'Skyrim in space', last night's Starfield Direct showed off an awful lot of new information.