 During the first day of release , Steam showed over 230 @,@ 000 people playing Skyrim concurrently . Within two days of the game 's launch , 3 @.@ 4 million physical copies were sold . Of those sales , 59 % were for the Xbox 360 , 27 % for the PS3 , and 14 % for the PC . In the first week of release , Bethesda stated that 7 million copies of the game had been shipped to retailers worldwide , and that total sales through the following Wednesday were expected to generate an estimated US $ 450 million . By December 16 , 2011 , this had risen to 10 million copies shipped to retail and around US $ 620 million . Additionally , Valve stated that it was the fastest selling game to date on their Steam platform . Steam 's statistics page showed the client breaking a five million user record by having 5 @,@ 012 @,@ 468 users logged in January 2 , 2012 . Total number of sold copies on the PC platform is difficult to confirm because Valve does not publicly publish digital sales . During this time , Skyrim was the most @-@ played game on Steam by a huge margin , with double the number of players as Team Fortress 2 , the second @-@ placed game . In the United Kingdom , Skyrim was the 9th best selling title of 2012 . In June 2013 , Bethesda announced that over 20 million copies of the game had been sold . Regarding sales on the PC , Todd Howard stated in an interview with Rock , Paper , Shotgun that " Skyrim did better than we 've ever done on PC by a large , large number . And that 's where the mods are . That feeds the game for a long time . " Electronic Entertainment Design and Research , a market research firm , estimates that the game has sold 22 @.@ 7 million copies worldwide . 
