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).
Skyrim Special Edition mod stats
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.
Base game Skyrim mod stats
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 and downloads. This is likely due to Skyrim Special Edition being an overall better version of the game with Bethesda mod support, and not indicative of much else. After all, the base game version of Skyrim is still exceeding popular.
If you want a fuller picture, there are almost 60,000 Skyrim Special Edition mods on Nexus in total, with over 2 billion downloads as well. The original Skyrim also has almost 70,000 mods and 1.9 billion downloads, showing a lot of content.
You can see the full stats breakdown for Skyrim Special Edition here, and the original Skyrim here.
If you want even more, our look at the best games like Skyrim is sure to tide you over for Bethesda’s next big release. Or you can check out a big Bethesda sale that slashes Skyrim, Fallout, and even Doom.
