Fallout TV show fallout: More people are playing the games thanks to the Amazon series
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No one can accuse game studio Bethesda of not taking advantage of a good thing. As Amazon’s Fallout series hit the Prime Video library last week – after repeatedly changing its release date – the video game developer made Fallout 76 free-to-play for the weekend, which resulted in more people jumping into the Wasteland than ever before.
To be fair, Fallout 76 has had a rocky history. Its launch was plagued with bugs and design flaws, which resulted in a less-than-stellar reception from fans at the time. However, four years later, most of those issues have been ironed out, making Fallout 76 a solid entry in the ever-growing Fallout universe. As the Fallout television series generated more buzz for the franchise, the multiplayer title hit its highest concurrent player count ever on Steam as nearly 40,000 players jumped into the Wasteland.
It isn’t the only Fallout game that benefited from the series’ debut. Both Fallout 4 and Fallout: New Vegas more than doubled their concurrent player count from the previous month. The chart from SteamDB, which reports a wide variety of statistics from Valve’s Steam platform, showed that Fallout 4 has had an astronomical increase in players since the series’ release. In fact, enough people bought the game to send it to the top of Steam’s charts for revenue over the weekend.
Does this mean we’ll get more Fallout episodes? Not necessarily, as this isn’t a strong incentive for Amazon to continue funding the series based solely on game sales. However, it gives Bethesda an incredibly strong incentive to keep their relationship with the studio sweet and encourage them to keep the Fallout train running.
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