“Fallout 76” found a whole new world of players thanks to the popularity of Amazon’s “Fallout” TV series. The Bethesda Game Studios title, which first launched in October 2018, surpassed 20 million downloads and plays as of Wednesday.
That’s a jump from the 17 million players that “Fallout 76” totaled in December, ahead of the April 10 release of Jonathan Nolan’s TV adaptation of “Fallout” on Prime Video.
“It’s been sneakily popular for a while — but not at this level, and it’s just been great for the whole studio,” said Bethesda director and executive producer Todd Howard, who oversees the “Fallout” franchise. Variety.
In less than two months since the series premiered (and has already been picked up for a second season), daily active users across the “Fallout” video game franchise, developed and published by Bethesda, a division of Microsoft Gaming, have grown over 600% to more than 5 million players.
“Depending on the ‘Fallout’ game, you’re looking at a 4-6x increase in daily players, which is beyond anything I’ve ever seen in the 30 years I’ve been doing this,” Howard said. “Having an event that brings so many people to the games you have that have never played your games before is a big deal. New players who have never played a game or never played any of our games. It’s a really unique moment.”
In addition, the total number of concurrent players in “Fallout 76”, “Fallout Shelter”, “Fallout 4”, “Fallout 3” and “Fallout New Vegas” increased, while “Fallout 4” and “Fallout 76” currently sit within . The 7 best first-party Xbox Game Pass games by the hour, along with Bethesda’s “Starfield” and “Skyrim.”
Meanwhile, TV series Fallout attracted 65 million viewers in its first 16 days of availability, according to Amazon Prime Video, with Season 1 ending in its entirety on April 10. This makes it the second most watched title of all time. platform and the most viewed title since its debut on “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” in 2022.
The Fallout TV series, based on the Bethesda franchise of the same name, takes place two hundred years after the apocalypse. Rather than trying to follow any particular plot line from the video game “Fallout,” the drama simply focuses on “the gentle inhabitants of luxury fallout shelters who are forced to return to the irradiated hell their ancestors left behind — and are shocked to discover what awaits them an incredibly complex, hilariously weird and highly violent universe.”
Ella Purnell stars in the series alongside Aaron Moten, Kyle MacLachlan, Walton Goggins, Moisés Arias, Sarita Choudhury, Michael Emerson, Leslie Uggams, Frances Turner, Dave Register, Zach Cherry, Johnny Pemberton, Rodrigo Luzzi, Annabel O’Hagan and Xelia Mendes -Jones.
As for plans for “Fallout” season 2 on Amazon go, Howard, who is an executive producer alongside series creator Nolan, is able to report that currently the plan is to continue following the characters from season 1 rather than moving on to another iteration. “Fallout” world for new episodes.
“One thing about television that Jonah told me from day one is about finding characters. And I think it’s really amazing how these characters resonated with the audience,” Howard said. “And so I think there’s still a lot to tell.” There are so many great characters – I love Norm and Chet, I love the two of them in every scene. And of course we have Ghoul and Lucy and Maximus. But there are so many great characters with so many more stories to tell.”
So what does all this Fallout success mean for new games in the universe?
“The TV show, I feel like it’s been 15 years since I started talking about it — but it’s been five years since Jonah and I first talked,” Howard said. “And the games last a good five years. So we’re planning future games in this series and there’s nothing to talk about right now, but we’re always planning.”