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Bethesda claims Doom Eternal had series' best opening weekend yet

Bethesda claims Doom Eternal had series' best opening weekend yet

American publisher Bethesda has said that the recently-released Doom Eternal has set a brand new record for opening weekend sales for the franchise.

The firm didn't provide any numbers to back up its claims, but the company did reiterate that Doom Eternal was the best-selling title on Steam last week. That's something PCGamesInsider.biz had already reported on, as we do every week.

During its opening weekend, Doom Eternal hit a high of 104.9k concurrent players on Steam alone according to SteamDB. That's 236.9 per cent higher than the record simultaneous user figure for the game's predecessor, 2016's Doom.

Sales are potentially higher due to the number of people around the world who are staying indoors at the moment to slow down the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus. There was also a groundswell of excitement around Doom Eternal, in part due to the critical acclaim of Doom 2016. 

"We want to thank our millions of fans for their enthusiastic support of this amazing title," Bethesda's SVP of global sales Ron Seger said.

“Despite thousands of retail stores closing, we are pleased so many fans have been able to enjoy Doom Eternal."


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.