Average Skyrim PC playtime clocks in at 75 hours

PC gamers of Bethesda's single-player RPG The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim have clocked up an average of 75 hours playtime in the game, according to stats from Steam.

Speaking during the 2012 D.I.C.E. Summit in Las Vegas, Todd Howard, creative director for Bethesda Game Studios, said that following the release of modding tools for the game for the PC, he hopes that one day a similar service could be offered to home console owners.

"On PC they can download our tools, they can create their own mods. It's something we spent a lot of time on and we're really excited about," he said of the Skyrim Creation Kit, released this week.

"Our PC audience is really, really engaged. All the players in Skyrim are, there over ten million people that have played the game so far, which is amazing to us. Multiple millions are online with their PCs so it's done really well. And with Steam we get to see all the stats.

"Of those millions of people on the PC the average playtime is 75 hours. It's something we'd like to see come to consoles one day. You get this thing where it's not just the game but [players] can now take it and change it. Gaming is the ultimate combination of art and technology and allowing the players to be their own director."

Howard also teased some ideas from a recent internal game jam at Bethesda, where developers were given free reign for a week to experiment with anything they wanted, so long as the final result was incorporated into the game.

Dragon mounts, spears, kill cameras for magic, assassin's vision, hanging and moving structures in dungeons, build-you-own houses, vampire feeding, spell combos, mounted combat and shouts using the Kinect peripheral were all shown off, with Howard adding that some may or may not appear in future DLC.