“Fallout 76” crosses 20 million players among TV series and future games

“Fallout 76” found a whole new world of gamers thanks to the popularity of Amazon’s “Fallout” TV series. The Bethesda Game Studios title, first released in October 2018, surpassed 20 million downloads and streams on Wednesday.

This is a jump from the 17 million players of “Fallout 76” totaled in December, before the April 10 release of the television adaptation of Jonathan Nolan’s “Fallout” on Prime Video.

“It’s been pretty popular for a while, but not to this level and it’s just been really 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 of the “Fallout” video game franchise titles developed and published by Bethesda, a division of Microsoft Gaming, grew by over 600% to over 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 my 30 years of work,” he said. Howard said. “Having an event that brings so many people into games that you have who have never played your games before is a big thing. New players who have never played a game or have never played one of our games. It’s a really, really unique moment.

Additionally, total concurrent players increased in “Fallout 76,” “Fallout Shelter,” “Fallout 4,” “Fallout 3,” and “Fallout New Vegas,” while “Fallout 4” and “Fallout 76” currently rank in the Top 7 first-party Xbox Game Pass games by hours, along with Bethesda’s “Starfield” and “Skyrim.”

Meanwhile, according to Amazon Prime Video, the “Fallout” TV series attracted 65 million viewers in its first 16 days of availability, with season 1 dropping in its entirety on April 10. This makes it the second most watched title of all time on the market. platform and the most watched title since the debut of “The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power” in 2022.

Based on the Bethesda franchise of the same name, the television series “Fallout” takes place two hundred years after the apocalypse. Rather than attempting to follow a specific story from a “Fallout” video game, the drama simply focuses on “the kindly denizens of luxury fallout shelters who are forced to return to the irradiated hellscape that their ancestors left behind – and are shocked to discover an incredibly complex, joyously strange and very violent universe awaiting them.

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 Xélia Mendes-Jones.

As for plans for Amazon’s “Fallout” season 2, Howard, who executive produces alongside series creator Nolan, is able to announce that the plan is to currently continue following the season’s characters 1, rather than moving to a different iteration of a “Fallout” world for new episodes.

“The one thing about television that Jonah told me from day one is that it’s about finding the characters. And I think it’s really cool to see how these characters have resonated with audiences,” Howard said. “And so I think there are still stories to be told there.” 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 still have so many 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 started talking about it – but it’s been five years since Jonah and I first talked about it,” Howard said. “And the matches last a good five years. So we are planning future games in this series, and nothing to say yet, but we are still planning.