Oblivion Remastered hit 4 million players in less than a week, with a big chunk of them buying the game on Steam

First reported by Eurogamer, Bethesda has publicly celebrated over four million players checking out its recently-launched remaster of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion. Alongside Baldur's Gate 3 Patch 8, the remaster has turned an otherwise-quiet April into boom times for RPG fans.

Bethesda broke the news by tweeting the following message on X, "The Everything App": "We are so grateful to the over four million of you that have already ventured into Cyrodiil with Oblivion Remastered. Thank you!"

In the context of Xbox's Game Pass service, that number isn't going to be one-to-one with full price sales, but it still indicates a stunning success for the game overall. Absent celebratory messages like these, the top-selling and concurrent player count charts on Steam and SteamDB are one of the few concrete ways we have of determining a game's sales success, but they're only part of the picture for a multiplatform release.

Oblivion's presence on PC Game Pass doesn't seem to have hurt its straight up PC sales all that much, though. It currently has the fourth-highest player count on the platform according to both Steam charts and SteamDB, nearing 200,000 players at the time of writing. It's also number one on Steam's official top sellers list, and number two on the SteamDB best selling tracker.

Both assess games by overall revenue (importantly, not number of units sold) over a set period of time⁠—24 hours for Steam's official count, with extra scoring weight applied to sales in the past three hours, according to Steamworks documentation. The fact that it's overall revenue, including DLC and microtransactions, explains how weapon skin micro-economy Counter-Strike 2 and the $400+ Steam Deck remain perennial fixtures, while SteamDB may weight recent sales in a slightly different fashion, explaining the swapped positions of CS2 and Oblivion.

Which is all very fascinating to me, and a helpful indicator of how Steam concurrents and best selling status relate to overall sales success for the multiplatform, Game Pass-accessible games coming out of Microsoft. Also, I guess the people wanted more Elder Scrolls. Who could have guessed?

I've personally been enchanted by a Microsoft-supplied code of the game, a remaster of a childhood favorite. The celebratory atmosphere has left me feeling conflicted, sometimes even physically queasy, in the context of the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) National Committee's call to boycott Xbox products in light of Microsoft's business ties to Israel amid its ongoing genocide in Gaza and illegal occupation of the West Bank.

"[Microsoft] provides the Israeli military with Azure cloud and AI services that are central to accelerating Israel’s genocide of 2.3 million Palestinians in the illegally occupied Gaza Strip," reads the announcement on the BDS website. "After 34 years of deep complicity with Israel’s military, the Israeli army relies heavily on Microsoft to meet technological requirements of its genocide and apartheid regime."

I don't know what to say to a fellow Elder Scrolls fan looking to join in on this fun—I particularly can't speak from a position of moral authority, having played, enjoyed, and covered the game so much already. But it's ultimately up to Microsoft to cleave its much-beloved games business from deadly serious, real-life politics.