Skyrim mods top 100 million monthly downloads, and it’s 12 years old

pcgamesn.com:

In news that may come as a shock, Skyrim mods are more popular than ever, with some new stats for 2023 showing a record number of creators and creations for the Bethesda RPG game. With Skyrim itself over a decade old, and multiple mod-supported versions available to choose from, the fact that it’s more popular with mods than ever is astonishing.

There’s been a meteoric rise in Skyrim mods, modders, and downloaders since the Skyrim Special Edition launched in 2017, with Nexus Mods’ stats illustrating how the number of downloaded mods has increased tenfold between 2017 and 2023.

November 2017 saw over 10 million Skyrim mods downloaded on the platform, while January 2023 had almost 115 million, before February 2023 tapered off to just below 90 million. The number of new files has also risen on a similar trajectory, hitting around 1500 every month, or 50 a day on average, at the end of 2022.

For both images, the downloads are in blue, and the new files are in yellow (images taken from Nexus mods).

With total conversion mods for both Skyrim and Oblivion, and countless Skyrim mods of varying sizes still getting thousands of downloads every day, this isn’t exactly all that surprising. In fact, the impending Starfield release date may have Bethesda players clamouring for as much content as possible.

The most surprising part to me is that despite Skyrim’s age, which the vanilla version of Bethesda’s fantasy game definitely shows, the modding community has clearly only been growing and growing. Both the amount of players downloading mods, and those making them, has only been going up.

Funnily enough, the Nexus Mods’ stats for the original Skyrim have been doing the opposite to the Special Edition, showing a downturn in new files