“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, passed 20 million downloads and plays as of Wednesday.
That’s a jump from the 17 million total players “Fallout 76” had in December, ahead of the April 10 release of Jonathan Nolan’s “Fallout” TV adaptation on Prime Video.
“It was sneaky popular for a while — but not to this level, and it was just great for the whole studio,” Bethesda director and executive producer Todd Howard, who oversaw the “Fallout” franchise, told Diversity.
In less than two months since the series premiered (and has already been picked up for a second season), daily active users in the “Fallout” video game franchise, developed and published by Bethesda, a division of Microsoft Gaming, have grown more than 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 seen in the 30 years I’ve been doing this,” Howard said. “To have an event that introduces as many people to gaming as you have that have never played your games before, that’s a big thing. New players who have never played a game or never played any of our games. It’s a really, really unique moment.”
Additionally, total concurrent players have increased in “Fallout 76,” “Fallout Shelter,” “Fallout 4,” “Fallout 3” and “Fallout New Vegas,” while “Fallout 4” and “Fallout 76” are currently in the Top 7 First-Party Xbox Game Pass Games by Hours, along with Bethesda’s “Starfield” and “Skyrim.”
Meanwhile, the TV series “Fallout” drew 65 million viewers in its first 16 days of availability, according to Amazon Prime Video, with Season 1 dropping in its entirety on April 10. This makes it the second most-watched title worldwide and the most-watched title since The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power debuted in 2022.
Based on the Bethesda franchise of the same name, the Fallout TV series takes place two hundred years after the apocalypse. Instead of trying to follow a specific “Fallout” video game plot, the drama simply focuses on “gentle inhabitants of luxurious radioactive waste shelters who are forced to return to the irradiated hell left behind by their ancestors — and are shocked to find an incredibly complex, gleefully weird and extremely cruel universe that awaits them.
Ella Purnell stars in the series alongside Aaron Moten, Kyle McLachlan, Walton Goggins, Moise Arias, Sarita Choudhury, Michael Emerson, Leslie Ughams, Frances Turner, Dave Register, Zach Cherry, Johnny Pemberton, Rodrigo Luzzi, Annabelle O’Hagan and Xelia Mendes – Jones.
As for plans for Amazon’s “Fallout” Season 2, Howard, who is executive producing along with series creator Nolan, can reveal that the plan right now is to continue following the characters from Season 1, rather than moving on to another iteration of a “Fallout” world for new episodes.
“The one thing about television that Jonah told me from Day One is to find the characters. And I think it’s really cool how these characters resonate with audiences,” Howard said. “So, I think there are more stories to tell. There are so many great characters — I love Norm and Chet, I love them both in every scene. And obviously we have Ghoul, Lucy and Maximus. But there are so many great characters who have 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 took us 15 years from when I first started talking about it — but it’s been five years since Jonah and I first talked,” Howard said. “And the games take a good five years. So we have plans for future games in this series and there’s nothing to talk about right now, but we’re always planning.”