Doom: The Dark Ages Tops 3 Million Players, Biggest Launch in id's History - Sales
by William D'Angelo , posted on 20 May 2025 / 12,460 Views
Publisher Bethesda Softworks and developer id Software have announced Doom: The Dark Ages has surpassed three million and is the biggest launch in the history of id Software.
"Thank you for making DOOM: The Dark Ages the biggest launch in id's history - 7x faster to 3 million players than DOOM Eternal," said publisher Bethesda.
Doom: The Dark Ages released for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC, and Xbox Game Pass on May 15.
Another recent Bethesda game, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, topped four million players within a few days of release.
Thank you for making DOOM: The Dark Ages the biggest launch in id's history - 7x faster to 3 million players than DOOM Eternal.
— Bethesda (@bethesda.net) May 20, 2025 at 4:12 PM
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A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can follow the author on Bluesky.
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Games got a great chance to be my GOTY! It's been a hell of time playing :)
Players dont mean copies sold
launching day and date on a subscriptiuon service also means sales are a useless metric for how many people are playing a game. In that situation you want to look at overall engagement. A game could sell 30 million in a day and microsft will still never give sales numbers now.
Players don't mean shit and engagement doesn't mean shit. Only sales matter in the long run. They are only talking about players, because that's the most positive spin they can put on it. Trying to gaslight investors. If the sales were good, they would be announcing it.
Just a guess. But lets say they got over 3 million people to pay $20 to access Doom: The Dark Ages via Gamepass. Well, that's over $60 million dollars in revenue.
Then you have to consider that 3 million isn't just Gamepass users. Its also people buying the game on PS5 and PC for $70. Not sure how many people did that.
I would like to an exact sales number too. But its not the only source of revenue.
Agreed, at this point it would make more sense for MS to give an estimate of the revenue they believe the game generated. For Doom Eternal, they boasted $450 million in revenue after 9 months.
We know. But based on Steam numbers, the internet talking heads claimed this was the least played Doom game in it launch window. Hence, it was deemed a flop.
MS and Bethesda announcing this means the speculation was wrong and Gamepass is more popular than assumed. Not surprising since it has had a bunch of notable release in relatively short period.
People that stalk steam charts pages every day after every new game release said it was a failure though. Steam charts is apparently the totality of game discussion at this point.
I doubt people think its a failure , its just for some reason its not selling well on pc/steam.
Alot of people probably played this through gamepass, and as always with games on gamepass, total players is basically worthless metric (if 100% of gamepass players played it, it would be at like 35m-40m, from that alone, without needing 1 sale to reach that number). They should give sales if they want to drive away any doubts.
Doom eternal apparently took about a 1month to reach 3m copies sold (and thus players). It wasn't on gamepass back then. So yes, its reached 3m "players" faster than Doom Eternal. The majority of these players are from gamepass (i'd guess over 2/3rds), which would put sales at like 1m in a week or so, which again isn't half bad. (5-6days of release, +2 days early access)
even just on steam there's the usual ratio of 40-60x the number of steam reviews to get the sales for AAA games which means around half a million from steam alone and there is pc gamepass as well(the way i played it)
Is 3m players actually impressive? MH: Wilds sold 8m in 3 days at full price. Sony big first party games regularly do 4m+ sales(Ragnarok 5.1m) in 3 days at $60-70. ToTK launched with 10m sales.
So 3m players across 3 platforms while being available at no extra cost to a significant number of the 30m+ Gamepass subscribers seems nothing special. Not if you consider Doom a big game.
Has Doom ever been a franchise that sold 20 million plus? it was huge by the standards of 90s pc gaming but doom 2016 and eternal were also just games that go on to sell a couple million lifetime. people were using the steam CCU numbers to suggest that there was a huge drop off in interest from Eternal and totally ignored the influence of gamepass.
Doom Eternal in its launch year had sales on par with Ghost of Tsushima, which was 13m+ lifetime and 2.2m in launch week. Hard to say if it was more front loaded or not though. It definitely seems like a 10m+ franchise, but maybe 20m is too far.
Games do sell a lot more these days though than they did in the past. God of War went from a 5m franchise to 20m with GoW(2018), similar for Uncharted 4 and a lot of Nintendo games on Switch.
Apparently Doom Eternal made $450m in its first 9 months. That’s a pretty big time game. Depending on the average sales price that’s likely approaching 10m units in year one.
It sold around 3m in it’s first month so it does seem it had pretty good legs.
Not surprising most in Game Pass. It's the same with Oblivion Remastered and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 - even when those selling well in all platforms,
"Xbox was the No.1 platform for both games because of that Game Pass inclusion. 45% of Expedition 33 players were on Xbox, while 47% of Oblivion players were on Microsoft’s platform."
