Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls series has been a staple of role-playing video games. In terms of mainline entries, we’re five releases in, with a sixth one out there somewhere being worked on. But we’re not here to talk about the future. We’re going to be discussing just how successful each game in the franchise has been.
Make no mistake—as the years have gone by, The Elder Scrolls has only become more popular. But the series had to start somewhere, and I think it’s interesting to compare the sales figures of each one side-by-side to really hammer home this success story.
6. The Elder Scrolls: Arena – 3,000 copies
At the time of release, Arena sold around 3,000 copies, according to former lead designer Ted Peterson. While these numbers have probably gone up since then, there doesn’t seem to be any indication of how many the first TES game has sold overall. The fact that you can get it free these days makes it a moot point.
Cast your minds back three decades if you can. A small studio from Maryland, which had been developing sports games and a couple of Terminator adaptations, unleashed the first Elder Scrolls entry into the world. Called Arena, the crew had no idea just how big their fantasy universe was going to become.
Arena may represent the seeds of The Elder Scrolls as a franchise, but gaming wasn’t the corporate-driven beast we know it as today, which is probably why the sales figures don’t look that impressive.
Still, Arena made an impression, setting into motion new ways of creating interactive stories with detailed role-playing elements. The fact that it had a procedurally generated world was also hugely impressive for the time.
5. The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall – 700,000+ copies
Selling 120,000 copies upon launch, Daggerfall easily surpassed Arena. By mid-2000, former Vice President of Bethesda Softworks Pete Hines said the game had sold over 700,000 copies, and that number would have gone up since.
Encompassing a world the size of Great Britain, The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall improved on Arena in just about every way possible. While it’s perhaps not as big as its predecessor, it beefed up the role-playing aspects and made a huge splash in the genre.
That it won more awards than Arena shows that Bethesda was onto something. It had enormous scope and a world so huge that its in-game map had a search function! Daggerfall was the first Elder Scrolls game I played; its vastness was mind-blowing to me, and I still go back to it sometimes.
If you want to experience Daggerfall today, you’re best off playing the Unity version from GOG. It’s a complete revamp of the game, keeping the visuals and classic style of the original but giving it a few quality-of-life tweaks and allowing for mods. It’s also free.
4. The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind – 4 million copies
Now we’re getting into the big figures. Morrowind was a hit when it was first released, and people are still buying it more than 20 years later. By the end of its launch year, the game had shifted around 200,000 copies. By mid-2005, that number had gone up to more than 4 million in sales.
The leap in visual quality between Daggerfall and Morrowind is utterly staggering. The Elder Scrolls 3 – released at the start of the new millennium – was a triumph in terms of immersion and advanced graphics. Sure, it’s aged horribly now, but back then, just seeing the teaser screenshots prior to release was all the evidence I needed to know that the new TES game was going to be something special.
Morrowind is one of the smallest entries in terms of map size, but that didn’t matter. It had a detailed world filled with a host of NPCs encased in a uniquely built world that took things beyond the usual knights and gray castles we’re used to seeing in fantasy.
Morrowind was also the first entry to get a console port. It was released on the original Xbox and PC and went down as one of the best-selling games on the system at the time, almost surpassing Halo. Look at most people’s lists of favorite Elder Scrolls entries, and chances are high that Morrowind will be at the top.
3. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion – 9.5 million copies
According to a 2015 report from Polygon, Oblivion sold around 9.5 million copies throughout its lifetime, turning the small, Ultima-inspired RPG series into a globally renowned video game franchise.
Oblivion was a phenomenal hit when it launched in 2006. Despite arriving just four years after Morrowind, it was yet another leap in just how advanced gaming visuals were becoming.
By now, The Elder Scrolls had a huge following, making Bethesda one of the biggest developers in the world. True, that Oblivion was when the series began to lean more towards action rather than deep role-playing aspects, but the sales numbers speak for themselves.
Oblivion has a Metacritic score of 94 on Xbox 360 and has gone down as one of the top 100 video game releases of all time. I mentioned how blown away I was by Morrowind, but Oblivion absolutely knocked it out of the park for me when I first saw it.
2. The Elder Scrolls Online – Over 15 million copies
The Elder Scrolls Online was one of the top-selling games in the UK when it was released in 2014, and it has sold millions since. According to Pete Hines, ESO sold more than 15 million units as of 2020.
There’s an argument to be made that Elder Scrolls Online isn’t part of the mainline series. However, I decided to include it because the numbers are still impressive.
The fact that this is an MMO is what sets it apart from the other Elder Scrolls games. The series is noteworthy for its focus on a single-player narrative. ESO instills players with a sense of power and destiny fulfillment, though that does sort of fall by the wayside when thousands of people are playing as the story’s hero.
While I did play the beta – which was buggy – I never gave much attention to Elder Scrolls ONline. It’s definitely brought in a lot more players over the years, thanks to it ditching the subscription model required to play it. But it must be doing something right, as it’s generated around $2 billion in revenue as of 2024.
1. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – 60 million copies
There was never any doubt this was at the top, was there? The most recent figures show that Skyrim has sold over 60 million copies since 2011. That might not be enough to beat out the likes of Minecraft, Grand Theft Auto 5, or even Tetris, but what other game can boast being one of the most successful releases ever?
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is considered by many to be not only the greatest RPG of all time but one of the best video games in history. At the time of writing, Skyrim is registering over 11,000 concurrent players, according to SteamDB. That’s nearly four times the amount that bought the original Arena, let alone played it.
We can make a lot of arguments about how Oblivion is buggy as hell and has taken up too much real estate in the gaming sphere, but that doesn’t change the facts. The game was a surefire hit before it was even released almost 13 years ago.
Today, it continues to attract a steady stream of players and modders and boasts a total of 229 awards, according to IMDb. Yeah, gamers may be sick of seeing and talking about Skyrim, but it’s definitely going down as one of gaming’s biggest achievements–at least, until The Elder Scrolls 6 dethrones it.
