According to MSNBC Skyrim has shipped more than 10 million copies of the game so far and has earned over $650 million (yep over a half billion dollars.)

And it is the fastest and best Steam selling game in history, selling, already, more than three times any PC game on the Steam site this year:
http://video.msnbc.msn.com/in-game/45701325/#45701325

ETA:

I believe this means PCs should get more attention, like being able to map keys to the keypad for us south paws, among other things.

Doesn't surprise me one bit, it's a game that received alot of hype before release and already had a large fanbase.

Still good news though

Coolio. I love the game. I am a hardcoe gamer and really no negative feed back. Of course I can be like glitch here glitch there, but I look at it like voting in politics. If you didn't vote, don't bch(if you weren't involved in making the game don't be ignorant and assume they were rushed and blah blah blah cause you don't know). Anyways, great job Bethesda money well spent on my part I think.

Great, they deserve it.

This right here is motivation to make the next game even better!
(If that is even possible )

Or to make the next game even more accessible.
(if that is even possible )

Hire more people and make next game 600 million dollar larger.

Or to make the next game work from the get-go.
(if that is even possible )

I lost track of how many hours I have spent, well over 200. Money well spent indeed! And to think the CK is not even out! I can only imagine what this game will look like 6 months from now.

Gulp. Please no. Please pay more attention to the fan reaction than to the sales.

Hype yes but with the advent of the internet word travels fast when hyped games svck. Look at Dragon Age 2, failed pretty hard in terms of sales compared to the original and it got plenty of hype around the web.

Congrats Beth. You deserve it.
Just make sure to use some of it on a bigger crew and budget for TES VI: Aldmeri Dominion.

Congrats Bethsda, the community and the fans for making and being smart enough to step off the EA/Activision/Blizzard tread mill of mediocrity. It is about time a game so completely different than anything else on the market except for inhouse games gets some recognition. Seriously after the disaster of Dragon Age 2, the pile of [censored] that is The Witcher 2, and having to follow up Fallout New Vegas, that is pretty big piles of [censored] to avoid stepping in with very large shoes to be filled, and having done so Bethesda, props.

Asai

That is a poor anology.

If you don't vote, you've had about as much input in making policy as somebody who did vote. The only thing that's different is that if you did vote, you have a chance to pick who will be making policy without your input for the next few years.

But.but but. i was told pc games were dying so I have my pc on ebay. Gonna trade it in for Wiii

I got the Wii only for zelda games, so yeah its valid

Skyrim has a lot of flaws, and a lot of things I don't like, but it's still better than most every game ever created.

Congrats Bethesda! Don't spend it all at once; some of us want TES VI and Fallout 4 to be [at least as] good.

I figured they would make alot after they released it, only low percentages didnt like it or having problems with it. As long they release the construction toolkit for PC users, it would be alot better. If they keep adding new expansions for Skyrim, they will surely make extra profits. The question is what are they willing to add this time?

I'm happy for Beth and I will be more happy still if the employees, including the staff cook get a good bonus. They deserve it despite being disappointed in some of their decisions.

The MSNBC info is BS, it can't have earned $650 million. If every copy of those 10 million shipped was already sold, and sold for an average of $60, it still would only have earned $600 million. But those 10 million shipped are not all sold, and a lot of the copies were sold for a lot less than $60, enough that the limited number of collector's editions sold could in no way balance it out to make there be an average selling price of $60. The MSNBC clip also says that Skyrim has sold 3 times as many copies as any PC game this year... which is also obviously BS (Battlefield 3, MW3 - both have sold significantly more than Skyrim). Even if every last one of Skyrim's copies sold this year were all sold on the PC, that still wouldn't be true. That clip is simply poor journalism.

One mistake people commonly make in guessing how much a game has made from sales is to multiply the supposed number of copies sold by the North American MSRP. This misses the fact that the game isn't priced the same all the world over, and many copies are sold well beneath the NA MSRP, even within North America. But this MSNBC report makes additional mistakes beyond that one, by mistakenly thinking that copies shipped = copies sold, and by being ignorant of PC game sales this year, including Skyrim's which can be calculated by subtracting the public sales numbers for the 360 and PS3 versions from Bethesda's total claimed sales. Someone's living on another planet to think that Skyrim has sold 3x more than any other PC game this year. It's not even the first or second best selling PC game of the year.

Collectors editions cost a fair whack and were sold out in every store in my area. That almost certainly counts for the discrepancy.

Hopefully this means the next game will have a PC UI and control scheme that's not a sloppy port from console version.

I am glad that at least the 20th poster mentioned the obvious problem with the math. I'm a little concerned that #1 - #19 didn't.

Whatever the real numbers, its great news that the game is viewed as a success and hopefully generating sufficient revenue to make future efforts even better.

It doesn't even being to come close to balancing it out. They were sold out because there's a very limited numbers of them available. Most people don't drop that much on a game, only very hardcoe fans, which are a small minority.

It is good that bethesda earns so much, but there is something I don't understand:

-10 million copies shipped and $650 million collected
- around 6 million copies sold (I read a topic from bootysweet yesterday about it)


...well...how is it possible that bethesda earns more than $100 for each copy???