It sure looks like one of the biggest games of 2025 is one of the biggest games of 2006, as industry analyst Mat Piscatella says Oblivion Remastered is already the third-best-selling game of the year in the US.
I maintain that Oblivion is the third or maybe fourth-best game in The Elder Scrolls series, and there is no force in the universe that will move me off that point (except, I suppose, a new Elder Scrolls game that turns out to be really good and thus bumps all the others down a point). But there’s no arguing with numbers, and Oblivion Remastered is apparently putting up some big ones.
“After just one week in market (w/e 4.26) Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered is already the 3rd best-selling game of 2025 in the US ($ sales) trailing only Monster Hunter: Wilds and Assassin’s Creed Shadows,” Piscatella, executive director and industry analyst at Circana, wrote on Bluesky. “It was the best-selling game of the week.”
Piscatella clarified in a separate post that the number refers specifically to copies sold and not player counts, which include people playing through Game Pass: “A subscription is not a sale.” Bethesda announced that Oblivion Remastered had surpassed four million players last week.
I would not have expected a remaster of a 20-year-old RPG to become one of the biggest success stories of 2025, but PC Gamer’s Morgan Park made a very going point last week: For an awful lot of people, Oblivion Remastered is effectively the “new” Elder Scrolls game we’ve been waiting for since Skyrim dropped in 2011. If you were nine years old then, you’re 29 now, and that makes it a fundamentally different experience, irrespective of the updated graphics, UI, and other modernizations—which are excellent, by the way. Hell, even if you were 29 when Oblivion was actually new, that’s a lot of water under the bridge—enough to make a return to Cyrodiil particularly appealing.
In a separate post, Piscatella said Oblivion Remastered took the top spot on Steam in the US in terms of “total weekly active users” for the week ending April 26, came in fourth on Xbox consoles, and 15th on PlayStation. The game does seem to be doing particularly well on Steam: It remains near the top of the best-sellers chart, and the concurrent player numbers are holding up nicely too: More than 87,000 people are playing it right now—not bad at all for 3 pm ET on a Monday afternoon.
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