The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion: Remastered launched in a not-so-surprising shadow drop at the tail end of the month, and in just one week managed to vastly outsell the original Oblivion’s first 15 months on the market.
This comes from Circana, which reports that Oblivion was not just the best-selling game in the U.S. for the month of April in dollar sales, and the third best-selling game of 2025 so far, it also sold more units in April than the original Oblivion managed in its first 15 months, and brought in more money than the original Oblivion did in its first 14 months. While that’s admittedly not a huge shock given the massively larger install base Oblivion sold into now compared to 2006, it’s still an incredible feat.
The remainder of April’s top 20 present some fascinating twists on the usual suspects we see on the charts. In second place for the month was Forza Horizon 5, up from No.42 last month due to its PS5 launch. Following it is MLB: The Show 25 at No.3, and then Minecraft at No.4, up from No.11 and almost certainly riding a high from the release of the Minecraft movie earlier in April.
At No.5 was last month’s winner, Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, and it’s followed by Indiana Jones and the Great Circle at No.6. It’s up from No.118 last month thanks to, like Forza, its PS5 release. As Circana analyst Mat Piscatella notes, four of the top five — and five of the top seven — best-selling games of the month on PlayStation platforms were published by Microsoft.
It’s also worth pointing out that The Last of Us: Part 2 jumped from No.23 to No.13 this month, possibly due to the second season of the TV show. And while Schedule 1 doesn’t appear on the sales charts, it did rank No.1 in U.S. total monthly active users on Steam (Call of Duty topped the MAU charts on PlayStation and Xbox).
If you’re an RPG fan, you might be wondering where the heck Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is. Per Piscatella, publisher Kepler Interactive doesn’t share digital data with Circana, and thus Expedition 33’s digital sales aren’t counted and likely resulted in it not appearing anywhere on the chart. Piscatella did tell me that its physical sales ranked it among the top 35 best-sellers in April, No.22 on PlayStation, and it was 19th in monthly active users on Xbox and 21st on Steam. “It released towards the end of the month, and started a bit slow (player count rankings have improved each week since launch through May 10),” he said. “All of those bits reflect a very successful result for a game of its type.
“It’s a game that was been incredibly well received by the enthusiast audience, but by the end of the month had not crossed over to the mainstream in a significant way. We’ll have to see what May ends up looking like (with more physical copies entering the market and word of mouth pushing the game to a bigger audience).”
Overall, April consumer spending on video games was down 3% year-over-year to $4.1 billion, with content spending down 2%. Non-mobile subscription spending and console digital premium downloads were up, but all other content segments were down. And accessories spending was down 2%.
Hardware was also down 8%, reaching the lowest monthly hardware dollar sales total reached in the U.S. market since July 2020. The PS5 was once again the best-selling console in both unit and dollar sales despite dropping 5% from last year. The Switch dropped 37%, but the Xbox Series console actually grew its sales year-over-year by 8%.
April 2025 U.S. Top 20 Best-Selling Games:
- The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion: Remastered (NEW)
- Forza Horizon 5
- MLB: The Show 25
- Minecraft*
- Assassin’s Creed: Shadows
- Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
- Call of Duty: Black Ops 6
- WWE 2K25
- NBA 2K25
- PGA Tour 2K25
- Monster Hunter: Wilds
- Split Fiction
- The Last of Us: Part 2
- EA Sports FC 25
- Grand Theft Auto V
- Red Dead Redemption 2
- The Elder Scrolls: Online
- Elden Ring
- Kingdom Come II: Deliverance
- Hogwarts Legacy
* Indicates that some or all digital sales are not included in Circana’s data. Some publishers, including Nintendo, do not share certain digital data for this report.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].
