The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition
Fair · RPG · 2016
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
NO RUSH.
Fair at $39.99. Buy it if you want it.
- Length
- 26h
- Value
- $1.54/hr
- Reviews
- 92% positive
Recent reviews trending down: 78% over the last 30 days against 92% all-time.
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Minimum on the Steam store: 8 GB of memory, NVIDIA GTX 470 1GB /AMD HD 7870 2GB, 12 GB of storage. Windows only.
Winner of more than 200 Game of the Year Awards, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition brings the epic fantasy to life in stunning detail. The Special Edition includes the critically acclaimed game and add-ons with all-new features.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
It has never been cheaper than $3.99. That was January 2025. 72 discounts in the 10 years on record. They run about 67 percent off, roughly 6 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 7 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 6 weeks.
On value it sits in the top 5 percent of its genre. It is pricier than 97 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 96 percent. Among the games that feel like it, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim ($19.99, scores 93) beats it on value, while it beats The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR ($59.99, scores 32).
74 from critics against 92 percent from players, and the player number comes from people who own the game.
Players rate it 92 percent positive over its lifetime, but the last 30 days run 78 percent. Something recent has soured the room. This site sampled 800 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 2 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written August 2026 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 73 percent of the 6,645 reviews written there were positive, against 92 percent overall, and those are 3 percent of everything written about it. It sells extras on top of the sticker price (cosmetic, currency); the score docks it lightly for that.
The main story runs 26 hours. Doing everything runs 204, 7.8 times as long.
It came out 10 years ago and 25.1K were still playing it at the last check.
Deck Verified, so no launch options and no controller remapping before it runs.
The drop-off
72% start to 3% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
25.1K players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
you disgusting greasy ♥♥♥ company. you cant make good games to save your life, and you cant even leave your old games alone you have to ♥♥♥♥ those too. every decision you make is guaranteed to be the wrong one, you dont deserve your IPs. please for the love of god go under
Bethesda broke mods so they could add IKEA branded furniture into the game. Yes, you heard that right. When you get over encumbered, you get sent on a quest to Falkreath to pick up IKEA furniture, which you have to put together yourself using the "staff of assembly" which looks suspiciously like an Allen key. Keep this product placement garbage out of my fantasy games.
This is the type of game that I'll play with a cup of tea on a rainy day. I don't have a single thing to dislike about Skyrim, but my favorite thing has to be the music, the landscapes, and the medieval ambiance. I definitely recommend if you're looking for something to fit medieval vibes or something with a little bit of everything, or something to play during autumn and winter because I feel like this game is...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition scores 66/100 on the BANG Score (fair value). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/489830/the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim-special-editionThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 11, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.