Bethesda Softworks has taken the video game industry by storm as the publisher pulled a blitzkrieg with The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered edition. While everyone expected a reveal of the game’s title, trailer, or some other kind of teaser, the publisher decided to drop the game right on everyone’s lap which caused social media to go crazy. This shadow drop has resulted in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered to dominate the competition during its launch day and launch weekend in 2025.
Developed by Virtuos and Bethesda Game Studios, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered quickly topped the charts on Steam hitting 171,221 concurrent players on launch day (04/22) and seeing a 26.7% increase to 216,784 players during its opening weekend. As a result, Oblivion Remastered easily, and quickly, topped Steam Charts of the Top 100 sellers and continues to retain the #1 spot as of the posting of this article.
For a brief time, even The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion GOTY ($15) and Deluxe Editions ($20), were quick to scale the Top 100 Seller’s, easily surpassing Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and reaching rank 13 on the list before mysteriously disappearing.
Within its first three days, Bethesda was quick to announce that TES IV: Oblivion Remastered had hit 4 million players total across all platforms. This milestone quickly outpaced Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ own 3 million player milestone and another major game release for 2025. Quite a feat for a remaster of a 19-year-old game that was released in 2006.
Considering that The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered is available on XBOX’s Game Pass, this could be the main reason why the player number has quickly increased. However, Bethesda has yet to reveal the number of copies sold for Oblivion Remastered. Though, considering the Steam player numbers, the sales figure for Oblivion Remastered could be a minimum of 250,000 sales on Steam during its first week since launch. Especially since, as seen by the Steam Refund Requests, there hasn’t been a significant spike in requests since it was released on 04/22 (307,000 requests) to 04/26 (319,099), only to drop down to 287,842 on 04/27 making that estimate a more feasible one.
The lack of any major spike of Steam refunds, could be indicative of this sales estimate and point to a potentially strong player retention rates, which was a problem for games such as Dragon Age: The Veilguard and Assassin’s Creed Shadows. As of 04/28, The Steam Achievements for Oblivion Remastered shows that 89.3% of players have, at the very least, Escaped the Imperial Sewers, and 0.7% have already completed the main questline (no-life kings, speedrunners, cheaters – who could have done it so quickly).
However, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered edition was not without its own controversy. While praised for its visual updates due to it being developed using Unreal Engine 5, consumers were quick to point out that some of the original game’s infamous dialogue bloopers and gameplay quirks had made it into the remastered version.
But the sour note that was quickly pounced upon was that The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered edition decided to replace Male/Female options in the character creation to Body Type 1 and Type 2. This Oblivion Remastered controversy showed that this might be a superficial change that isn’t reflected in the NPCs which still address the player by their gender, though the anti-woke crowd is now on the lookout for changes to female outfits and NPC appearances as further signs of the game being woke.
The controversy resulted in Nexus Mods, which has turned into a biased and censorious platform, to ban any mods released that changed the character creation screen back to the original Male/Female options. Only for Nexus Mods to finally give in to pressure and change its stance as loss of users and supporters appeared to be too much and is now allowing such mods to stay.
Despite this, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, priced at $50, is off to a strong start and it will be interesting to see how this RPG progresses during its first month.
We’d also like to note that it is wild that we finally get to see Oblivion remastered as it was one of 20 games we wanted to see get this treatment in an editorial we wrote for Maximum PC back in 2014.
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