Starfield Will Never Be The Next Skyrim, As It Received 90 Percent Fewer Mods This Year
via crozzbow.
James Lucas is an Executive Editor from Newcastle, England. They have written for sites like IGN, NME, GaymingMag, and VG247, with a special focus on FPS games, Soulslikes, and survival horror.
Skyrim wasn’t designed as a forever game, but its crunchy RPG mechanics and interactive world lent itself so intuitively to mods that it quickly fostered one of the most active communities in gaming history, who are to this day developing everything from fully-fledged remakes to game-sized expansions within the confines of the old 2011 sandbox. It’s no wonder Bethesda has been chasing that high for ten years now, with Xbox head Phil Spencer confidently predicting that Starfield would be another 12-year hit.
Unfortunately, Spencer was completely off the mark. Starfield’s peak player count plummeted from 330,000 to 137,000 within its first month, and dropped below 10,000 by the end of the year. Even with DLC, it hasn’t recovered. But what’s more damning is how little interest there is in modding the game; the vast expanse of space should have been fertile ground for a community to rival Skyrim’s, but it never even came close.
2025 proved no different. Skyrim – Special Edition received 21,406 new mods this year, for a total of 22,210 when factoring in the original game, whereas Starfield received roughly ten percent of that with 2,390 new mods. It’s still an impressive feat, but considering that the Creation Engine has built-in mod support, and the fact that Starfield had hundreds upon hundreds of empty planets for modders to play with, it only goes to show what little impact the game had compared to its predecessors.
Going entirely by Nexus Mods (other sites like ModDB and GameBanana would no doubt yield wildly different results), these are among the top-modded games of the year:
Skyrim: Special Edition – 21,410 mods.
There are a few key takeaways from this list – even after 14 years, nothing comes close to dethroning Skyrim; Starfield only just clawed its way into the top ten, winning a narrow race with Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 for the tenth spot; and Baldur’s Gate 3, the release date of which was pulled forward by Larian in 2023 to avoid being eclipsed by the first Bethesda tentpole in a decade, continues to storm ahead.
Starfield might not be the next Skyrim, but it’s not all bad. It holds the prestigious title of the 11th most-modded game in Nexus history, with a total of 11,900 mods. To reach the top ten, it would need to overtake Morrowind, which it may very well do in the coming years. For now, Morrowind has a pretty strong lead with 14,300 mods, a number that grew this year by a staggering 1,892, far surpassing the original Oblivion and even Fallout 3. However, with rumours mounting that Bethesda is planning a Cyberpunk 2077-style comeback for Starfield, maybe next year it will finally surpass Morrowind and take its #10 crown.
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As for 2026, you can look forward to TheGamer’s parent company, Valnet, opening its own modding site, which will offer salaries and host various competitions.
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