More people playing games.. More people.. Better economy generally means better sales.

I think it will sell the same as skyrim or slightly higher.

If BGS stepped up their game in overall story telling (characters and dialogue has usually been enjoyable, but main quests have more often than not been ho-hum), then FO4 will beat out Skyrim.

As for numbers, I think it's going to absolutely crush Skyrim for two reasons: 1) Nerd-dom is at an all time high. Chris Hardwick said it best in a recent interview, "we did it, we've won." I think Skyrim, AC, and Batman Asylum have all helped usher in a new wave of people willing to pick up games that are RPGs or have heavy RPG elements (not saying all those games are RPGs, just that they've helped bring RPG elements main stream in gaming). 2) Even if #1 isn't a big factor, FO4 is much more similar to CoD and other FPS fanfare in generally. I'm pretty sure many of those fans will be like, "oh, Fallout 4...I make a character and roam around in a wasteland? Cool, cool. Oh, I get to shoot [censored] - ya, I'll buy that."

Foh shizzle

Would it be better than vanilla Skyrim? I think it's very likely. Great exploration plus there is a high chance that the characters would be better written than in Skyrim.

Would it be better than my heavily modified Skyrim? Doubt it, but I'm sure it will get there.

Would the sales be greater than Skyrim? Yes, without a shadow of doubt.

Let's wait for the game to go gold first...

There are extra terrestrials in Skyrim too, those guys from "other realms" are not from the same planet or even the same dimension, they are just as "alien/extra-terrestrial" as life from other planets or dimensions in "sci-fi".

"Alien" or "demon/angel", i think the difference is mostly superficial generalization among scientifc observers vs "mythological" observers.

One thing missing from this discussion is the available hardware. Are there more PS4, Xbox One, and PC that can run FO4 than there were Xbox360, PS3, and PC that can run Skyrim when it was released? Kind of hard to sell more copies than available hardware.

Don't even talk about GTA 5 total sales figure. That game released on 5 platforms. Any comparison must be done on equivalent platforms.

There are about 25 million PS4s in the world, and about 13 million Xbox Ones. And of course, many millions of PCs (looking at the Steam hardware survey, 64% of Steam's 75 million users have a DX12-capable GPU, so there should be no shortage of gaming PCs that can handle Fallout 4).

I know plenty of people that bought a current gen system just to play this game. That speaks volumes.

I myself would never have bought a new system to play Skyrim.

I think sales have to do with it being a Bethesda and Elder Scrolls game. With each release, Bethesda games have a bigger and bigger fan base and get more popular. I don't see why Skyrim's sales wouldn't then transfer over to Fallout(which arguably has wider appeal being a "shooter" in a post-apocalypse setting than a fantasy game).

The Witcher doesn't have the same...charm, I guess? It has an open world, but it isn't the same as an open world Beth does, you can't play as your own character, and the leveling and gear system is different. There are people who wouldn't buy Witcher but would buy Bethesda.

So damn true... I don't take it seriously when people bring up Metacritic as some sort of "official" indicator just because it has many voters. Besides, I think anyone can register multiple user accounts, so go figure, the paradise of trolls and paid shills. As discredited as some like to paint them, I think the gaming journalists are more reliable than the "regular" users who rate a game like Skyrim 0%.

It's important to realise that the console install base is about half the size of the ps3 and 360 install base at the point of Skyrim's release.

I'm not convinced that Fallout 4 can outsell Skyrim. And the TES series is more popular by any conceivable metric, from sales, peak number of users and TES even won GameSpot's 'series of the decade' competition (in 2013) which was a glorified popularity contest.

Bwahahahahaha.....Pip-Boy editions are back....aaaand they're gone!! And people are talking like Skyrim sales are going to last lol.....I want whatever you guys are smoking because it must be good!!!

I definitely think F4 will beat Skyrim in sales. I personally prefer the high fantasy style over Fallout's, but this game will likely prove to be extremely immersive. I expect sales to be through the roof.

Only one rpg beats Skyrim's sales figures and that's DIablo 3. Technically some may argue that Diablo is not an rpg lol

I personally bought both Skyrim and Fallout 4 but I don't believe Fallout 4 can sell as much, its seting is more depressing, its world is uglier and doesn't inspire the heroic epopee that the trailers for Skyrim promissed, with crazy creatures and dragons [censored]in around and all tht [censored]. Here, we have an anti-charismatic average Joe in a blue coverall walking the dog in a rusty car cemetery. Yeah, dragons and naked Nords > all. What is it, dragons?

People acting like Skyrim was anomaly are on the sauce. Skyrim was 20 some odd years of hard work starting with Arena. Oblivion being one of the first games on the XBOX 360 helped a lot though. Since Morrowind BGS have been known to be one of the developers to really push the envelope every time they release a title. With near a decade of a reputation like that it was only a matter of time before one of their games tipped into the mainstream.

Sorry my mistake, it looks like that figure from VGChartz doesn't include digital sales (in store only).

The following site has made an estimation of PC vs console sales for Skyrim:

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Xbox 360: 2.2 mil-lion
PlaySta-tion 3: 1.5 mil-lion
PC: 2 Million

That puts PC at over a 1/3 of all Skyrim sales.

That means that two thirds of Skyrim sales were done without the carrot of the Skyrim modding community.

Dragons and Vikings (and 20 years of Elder Scrolls) may have been a perfect storm for Skyrim.

But the Fallout 4 pre orders certainly put F4 on track to be as big if not bigger than Skyrim.

We will just have to wait and see.

I will point out that the modding community for F3, FONV, and Skyrim kept PC sales going for years after release.

And for F4 they can now do the same for consoles.

Yeah, I'm not trying to take anything away from how FO4 performs. I'm just saying that Skyrim's success didn't come from left field and neither will FO4. Each game builds off it's predecessor's success when the studio is more recognizable than the series. There are a lot of people out there waiting for a "Skyrim 2" LMAO and don't know what Elder Scrolls is despite it being in the title. But those people know who Bethesda are.

I understand where you are coming from.

Bethesda has done amazing things with Elder Scrolls.

BTW, I've never played ES Online so I'm only commenting on their single player games.

They are building on Skyrim so F4 is in some ways an ES 5.9 with guns and mutants.

They also know they know how to do a Fallout game so they can work on expanding the game world and the story lines rather than worry if it is Fallout enough.

I'm mentally comparing Skyrim to Oblivion and then trying to image how F4 will compare to F3 and Skyrim.

Just based on F4 building on Skyrim, I'm very hopeful

Add in better story lines and some of the best in class elements from games like Witcher 3 and Dragon Age: Inquisition plus all the modern FPS elements...

Well lets just say I have high hopes.

And what ever faults Bethesda has, you certainly can't say that Bethesda is afraid to reach high.

Even if Bethesda can't pull off every thing they are trying for, I know the Fallout Modding community can do amazing things and will be eager to run with it once the tools come out.

I think the Fallout Shelter game is going to bring in a lot of eyeballs. I've had co-workers show me the Fallout Shelter game on their phones, which they found because it was the number one downloaded app for a long time. Several of them were inspired enough by the theme of the series that they are going to get the game on consoles. The live action trailer playing during football games is going to bring in a lot of new people, too.

And come on - there is a cute dog in Fallout 4. Kotaku is going to have new Dogmeat videos and memes every week after release.

I think it has a very good chance to.Mostly because of the seemingly major overhaul in the shooting mechanics.I'm predicting a lot of the COD & Halo fans will jump on board now.

That article seems a bit outdated, as Skyrim's total sales reached over 20 million two years ago. According to steamspy (no idea how accurate), this includes around 9.5 million PC copies.

Only after 30,000 copies of a video game being sold steamspy.com becomes accurate. So since the PC version of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has sold over 9.5+ million copies it's accurate.

If it sold 10,000 copies or 20,000 copies it would not be accurate.

At least that is what the steamspy.com developer said.

I would be willing to bet that the futuristic scifi setting is more popular to a bigger number of people than a medival fantasy setting; add that to the fact that FO4 looks like a very solid game to begin with and quite a lot of gamers knowing about Bethesda and their quality of products and I feel like it has a great chance of at least selling as well. It probably will surpass Skyrims sales numbers.