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The story of Fallout Season 2 is a direct continuation of the events of Season 1, but there was one major change that Amazon made to the show between seasons. For the first season, Prime Video dropped all eight episodes at once and let fans binge to their heart’s content. For Fallout Season 2, however, they’ve opted for a weekly release schedule. Well, now the viewing numbers are in, and we think Amazon might be rethinking that position a little.

Nielsen has released their streaming stats for the week starting December 15, 2025, and, on paper, it appears that Fallout Season 2 has fallen well short of the lofty numbers set by Season 1. Fallout was watched for 794 million minutes during the week of December 15-21, with the Season 2 debut falling on December 16. That is a healthy amount of viewers, but it isn’t a dent on the 2.9 billion minutes of watch time the first season got during the week it started streaming on Prime Video. That number remains the best premiere for any series on Prime Video. This is mirrored in the number of people turning to Fallout games at the moment; there is a definite increase over before the new season dropped, but the spike is nowhere near as high as when the entirety of Fallout Season 1 aired.

The most likely reason for this massive drop in viewers is that there were simply fewer new Fallout episodes to watch in that first week. Instead of eight hour-long episodes to binge, fans had the Fallout Season 2 premiere to watch. That single episode of Fallout was watched around 429 million times in that first week, which certainly suggests that there was a healthy appetite for more Fallout from fans.

The choice to change the release schedule for Fallout Season 2 was a gamble by Prime Video. We honestly think it was the right call, considering the new season started streaming just before the second batch of Stranger Things Season 5 episodes were released on Netflix. If all of Fallout had been released early, it might have been overshadowed by hype around the Stranger Things finale. There is still the possibility that Fallout Season 2 will amass larger collective viewing numbers than Season 1, but we won’t find out until after the final episode airs on February 4, 2026.

Get ready to get out of your Vault and into the Fallout world - with our help, of course. Here is a guide to the Fallout timeline, how to play and watch all of Fallout, details on the Fallout cast, how the Fallout cast & crew really get the harsh humor we're looking for, as well as a Q&A with Fallout showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner.