and by day one you mean life-time? if so then yes

Fallout 4 will definitely top Skyrim in sales by a large margin. Bethesda is a far more well-known company now and they'll get a lot more publicity from the gaming media. Also tons of the new Skyrim players will want to try out a new Bethesda RPG even if it isn't an Elder Scrolls game. This combined with a large following of the Fallout series eager for a new game and we'll see a game that'll sell hugely.

Yeah that's not day one that's lifetime sales, but it's still a big number no doubt. Very few video games can say they have hit the 20m mark.

Does anyone remember how many views the GTA V trailers back then had? I don't think it was much more... If at all...

The Skyrim trailer on IGN's youtube channel has 23 million views

Yeah, i am sure Fallout 4 will be even more popular then Skyrim, based on this Skyrim is owned by almost 12M people on steam alone :

http://steamspy.com/app/72850

Not sure how accurate this data is though.

whoops, just show you how long i've been outta the loop. Right, it was 10 mil day one up from 7mil for FO3. So maybe 15 mil day one at least but overall sales hitting 30 mil, too soon to say.

The amount of owners went up hugely in the last month according to that. From 8,895,721 to 11,816,990 in one month. Those numbers are probably not very accurate but it's clear that Skyrim is still selling well. The 20 million figure was announced in June 2013 so Skyrim might be closer to 25 million than 20 million by this stage.

your number are way off. according to the wiki, from October through the end of the year FO3 sold 4.7 million units. 1.14 million xbox units, and 550k PS3 units. that means about 3 million PC copies. still good sales, but nowhere near the numbers your throwing around. don't know what lifetime sales are, but games typically do most of their sales in the first week or two. after that they usually drop of precipitously. it's why companies use DRM. they're just trying to buy a few days, not make it hack proof. keep in mind, the single biggest release date sales is halo at 20 million I think. I really don't see a PC centric RPG title, or non sports/shooter game ever coming close to that.

Say no more.

http://web.archive.org/web/20090325011912/http://www.n4g.com/News-298592.aspx

http://www.techhive.com/article/153399/fallout3_units_shipped.html

The ownership went down, not up. It's because it spiked at the end of April because of a free weekend during the paid mods situation. The ownership count suddenly tripled then. It distorted later statistics, SteamSpy even notes that their current numbers are still unreliable because of that. But it was at 8.4 mln for a long time before the free weekend and it's back to that level now.

Oh it's using American dating so it's going the opposite way around. I don't get how the numbers were still distorted in May since the free weekend was in April. Wouldn't the ownerships drop back down to normal the moment the free weekend ended? And besides free weekend, there's no other way ownership could have dropped. There's no way to sell games on Steam or revoke ownership that I know of. Uninstalled games still count as owned.

I'm getting old. Shutting up now.

SteamSpy pulls data off a limited number of profiles (they probably can't read private profiles, for example). The margin of error is noted at every application page. About the free weekend, it lasted until 27th April. The game is removed from the owned list only when the user logs in next time, so you already have an extended ownership period for some people here. SteamSpy's data is based on several days samples, distorting it further. So that's how it reached the beginning of May. I don't know the details of their counting process, but I can tell you the numbers were steady before that weekend, creeping up slowly.

Skyrim sold 3.4 million units in it's first two days of going on sale. By the end of the week it had reached 10 million. Then it's well documented that it's lifetime sales were at the 20 million mark, which is apparently in the top 20 best selling games of all time.

Don't take this lightly though, for a single player RPG to move 20 million units is basically unheard of. That's like punching up there with Grand Theft Auto, Call Of Duty etc. Final Fantasy VII is considered a best seller at 10 million. So yeah, i think it was a case of releasing a game at the perfect time, with the perfect marketing and the fact that it's damn fun to play also helps

It's not guaranteed Bethesda will see that level of success again, especially since we're in a new generation of consoles which means a smaller (for now) playerbase.

With those numbers, you would think it would motivate Bethesda to get the next game made instead of waiting this long since F3

That's great news! I'm eagerly awaiting their E3 news!

And people were saying it wasn't a well made video. They kept it vague enough, and with enough visual details put into it to make people watch it over and over, trying to make some sense of it. Cheers!

I wonder if ad views are factored in to that. I've seen the trailer as an add before a few Youtube vids already

Probably, considering how many Fallout fans there are. I'm betting the collectors edition whenever its announce will sell out first.

Off-topic: I always wondered this...if I watch something on YT more than once, does the view count go up or stay the same?

Well... those numbers are significantly bolstered by the popularity of the last ES V title as well, no? Gamers are blessed with a Bethesda Game Studios release only 2-3 times in a ten year period so that demand really gets pent up!

Yeah. Fallout 4 is the longest they've spent on a game's development in a long time. It's taken them 4 years so far and they aren't done yet. By comparison, Fallout 3 was only 2 years in development. Skyrim was 3. Fallout New Vegas wasn't by them but it was still made in 2 years which makes Fallout 4 seem really long in development. Oblivion took about 4 years but that was after a delay. Fallout 4 might take 4 years if we're lucky but it'll probably go a bit over that.

Bethesda better have something to show for the length of time in development because it clearly isn't the engine they spent all that extra time on.

There was only ever one ES V so I don't get what you mean. TES V Skyrim was extremely popular and Bethesda are very well-known now. I think Apocalypse's saying that Bethesda should have capitalised on their new-found popularity instead of waiting 4 years until most new fans moved on.