How Many People Play Skyrim in 2023? (User & Growth Stats)
Skyrim was one of the most anticipated games of all time, when it released was released back in 2011, it was obvious that Bethesda has created one of the best games the world has ever seen. The hype was huge, and extreme media coverage resulted in the game earning 620 million dollars in a month, and selling nearly 10 million copies. As you can see this is a huge number of players, as was expected for such a huge title. Now, 11 years after its original release it’s time to see how the game fares when it comes to user and growth stats. Let’s see how many people play Skyrim in 2023?
Currently, Skyrim: Special Edition is played by around 17,285 people on Steam alone according to the data provided by Steam Charts. When you add the number of players that play older editions of Skyrim, this number goes up to 21 thousand people. In the last 30 days, Skyrim was played by around 30 thousand people which is a decent number for an 11-year-old game, but nowhere near the peak that happened in April 2015 when 90 thousand people were playing the game in that month alone.
Now that you know how many people currently play Skyrim, it’s time to analyze some other important numbers as well. If you’re interested stay with us and keep reading!
Why was Skyrim so popular?
Skyrim was the fifth installment in the already legendary The Elder Scrolls franchise. Skyrim followed the incredibly successful The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion which was released 5 years prior. Bethesda continued the tradition of building highly immersive, highly open-ended games placed in massive worlds that the player was free to explore however he liked.
The general public liked the setting of Skyrim, the Viking-Esque world appealed to the majority of players, the concept of Dragonborn sounded epic, and the powers associated with it gave birth to many pop-culture references as well as memes. It was an extremely covered game when it comes to media and the years that followed only served to prove the immortality of the game. Skyrim was re-released numerous times, which in itself became a meme.
The modding community kept it alive, giving both old and new players reasons to install the game yet again, after a few months, even years. It became a habit to occasionally re-install Skyrim just to immerse yourself in the familiarity of the world. Even though not all aspects of Skyrim were praised, the overall reception of the game was overwhelmingly positive. The last official numbers published back in 2016 showed that Skyrim sold 30 million copies, that was 6 years ago and the number is likely even higher at this point. Still, the fact remains that it’s one of the best-selling games of all time.
How many people play Skyrim in 2023?
At the moment of writing this post Skyrim: Special Edition is played by around 17,285 people on Steam alone. The older version of Skyrim aka Oldrim is played by around 2,212 people currently. Those are the data provided by Steam Charts. The number is likely higher since those are only the numbers related to the Steam platform.
In the last 30 days, however, Skyrim was played by 30 thousand people. Which is impressive for such an old game. In the detailed table below you can see the data regarding player numbers for the last 6 months. Only data for Skyrim: Special Edition will be shown since it’s the most recent version that most people at the moment are playing.
| Month | Avg. players | Gain/loss | Peak players |
| Last 30 days | 25,708.9 | +8.57% | 41,990 |
| December 2022 | 23,679.8 | +8.70% | 36,858 |
| November 2022 | 21,784.3 | +17.61% | 35,973 |
| October 2022 | 18,522.5 | +0.45% | 34,949 |
| September 2022 | 18,439.8 | -15.62% | 32,587 |
| August 2022 | 21,853.0 | +0.98% | 37,365 |
As you can see the player numbers are steadily rising, with only September being in the negative. Peak player numbers are more-or-less consistent and are nowhere near the 90,780 players that were playing the game throughout the month of April 2015. Still, this is nothing unusual for an older game and the player numbers are likely to decrease in the future, or in the best-case scenario, will remain unchanged drastically.
How many people stream Skyrim?
Currently, Skyrim has 159 live viewers according to the data provided by Twitch Stats. It had an average of 542 viewers over the period of the last seven days with 110 channels on average streaming the content weekly. This amounted to 90,855 hours of content watched in the last week. When it comes to popularity, Skyrim is ranked at #241 place and faring slightly worse than the Witcher: The Wild Hunt.
At its peak, Skyrim had 197,908 live viewers, this was recorded on January 7th, 2018. The peak number of channels was recorded on November 11th in 2021 with 489 channels streaming Skyrim-related content. You can see the detailed numbers for the last six months in the table below.
| Month | Concurrent viewers average | Gain/loss | Concurrent streams average | Gain/loss | Hours watched | Gain/Loss |
| January 2023 | 560 | +4.5% | 108 | +11.3% | 120K | -69.8% |
| December 2022 | 536 | -0.7% | 97 | +10.2% | 398K | +2.5% |
| November 2022 | 424 | +44.7% | 89 | +39.1% | 224K | +10.5% |
| October 2022 | 293 | -19.1% | 64 | +8.5% | 203K | -21.4% |
| September 2022 | 362 | -7.2% | 59 | -10.6% | 258K | -11.1% |
| August 2022 | 390 | -23.8% | 66 | -4.3% | 290K | -22.4% |
| July 2022 | 512 | -20.6% | 69 | +4.5% | 374K | -19.4% |
As you can see from the data provided, the general trend is that the gaming community is losing interest in Skyrim. The numbers show a consistent downward trend with the last 30 days being an exception. The numbers provided show that when it comes to the hours watched stats, the number of hours has nearly doubled in losses.
Will Skyrim be popular again?
This depends on whether some new announcements related to the game, or the future of the franchise will be made. The numbers likely won’t change drastically in the near future without any big changes. However, Skyrim managed to surprise in the past with its resiliency, whos to say it won’t happen again?
