‘Fallout 76’ surpasses 20 million players amid TV series, Future Games

“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 “Fallout 76” had 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 been really great for the whole studio,” director and executive producer Todd Howard, who oversees the “Fallout” franchise, told Bethesda. Diversity.

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 developed and published by Bethesda, a division of Microsoft Gaming, have grown over 600% to more than 5 million player.

“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 doing this,” Howard said. “To have an event that brings so many people to the games that you have that have never played your games before, that’s a big deal. New players who have never played any of our games. It’s a really, really unique moment.”

Additionally, the total number of concurrent players has increased in “Fallout 76”, “Fallout Shelter”, “Fallout 4”, “Fallout 3” and “Fallout New Vegas”, while “Fallout 4” and “Fallout 76” are currently within 7 of the best first-party Xbox Game Pass games by the hour, 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 in its entirety on April 10. That makes it the second most-watched title ever on the platform and the most-watched title since the debut of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power in 2022.

Based on Bethesda’s franchise of the same name, the TV series “Fallout” is set two hundred years after the apocalypse. Rather than trying to follow any specific “Fallout” video game storyline, the drama simply focuses on “gentle residents of luxury radioactive fallout shelters who are forced to return to the irradiated hellscape their ancestors left behind — and are shocked to discover an incredibly complex, joyful a strange and very violent universe that awaits 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 Xelia Mendes – Jones.

As for plans for Amazon’s “Fallout” Season 2, Howard, who is an executive producer along with series creator Nolan, can report that the current plan is to continue following the characters from Season 1, rather than switching to another iteration of the “Fallout” world. for new episodes.

“Jonah told me from day one about TV that it’s about finding characters. And I think it’s really amazing how those characters resonated with the audience,” Howard said. “And that’s why I think there’s still a story to tell. There are so many great characters — I love Norm and Chet, I love the two of them in every scene. And obviously we have Ghoul, Lucy and Maximus. But there are so many great characters who have a lot of stories to tell.”

So what does all this “Fallout” success mean for new games in the universe?

“On the TV show, I feel like it took us 15 years since I first started talking about it — but it’s been five years since Jonah and I first talked,” Howard said. “And the games last for a good five years. So we have plans for future games in this series and we don’t have anything to talk about right now, but we’re always planning.”