Oblivion Remastered becomes one of the year's biggest games with one week, no marketing and a dream
After only a week on the market, Oblivion Remastered became one of the best-selling games of the year without a shred of marketing before launch, proving that the RPG still has serious legs.
Oblivion Remastered has been a blast for RPG fans new and old, and it has made such an impact that it is already contesting 2025's gaming giants for sales numbers shortly after its launch.
The worst-kept secret in gaming is now revealed for all to see – Oblivion Remastered, an entirely restructured and rebuilt edition of the Elder Scrolls classic RPG, is in our hands. A new Bethesda adventure has been on the cards for some time, and as players have been holding out for anything pertaining to The Elder Scrolls 6, the remaster didn't arrive a moment too soon.
The hype for the game has given way for the excitement of rediscovering the best of Tamriel, and players are getting lost in the game's many winding, twisting quests – to such a degree that Bethesda is currently enjoying a pretty great influx of interest and income. It looks like we're about to have a real Oblivion Summer, as sales numbers for the remastered games are pretty incredible.
Oblivion makes a superhuman effort
According to video game analyst Mat Piscatella in a new BlueSky post, the Circana Retail Tracking Service has revealed that Oblivion: Remastered has, in only one week, become the third best-selling game in the United States in 2025. It trails behind Monster Hunter: Wilds and Assassin's Creed: Shadows, games that have already had more time on the market. It is, as you can imagine, the best-selling game of the week in which it launched.
This news comes after the game hit the remarkable concurrent player number of 216,784 on Steam (via SteamDB), as players forewent its appearance on Xbox Game Pass for PC and opted for Valve's service instead, playing it there in their droves. This is a pretty big deal, as it is likely to make for a heaving profit for Bethesda who outsourced the game's work to third-party developer Virtuos, proving that the company's classics still have incredible demand (providing they get a new lick of paint first).
Fascinatingly, though, the game didn't receive a higher number of concurrent players than Starfield at its peak, which enjoyed a concurrent player number of 330,723 when it launched (via SteamDB). This is likely a result of the total lack of marketing and the surprise-launch of Oblivion Remastered, but that doesn't mean that players aren't still rushing to the title, especially across Xbox and and PlayStation consoles.
It's easy enough for us as gamers to complain that nothing much is original these days, but with numbers like this, it's hard to deny that the system works, and the same players moaning will still buy the remasters put before them. Don't worry, we'll be buying them all too.
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