Skyrim 90% off sale sends the classic RPG skyrocketing up Steam charts

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 ways 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.