Fallout 76 celebrated a remarkable achievement this weekend when more than a million people logged into the game in a single day. On Steam, the game hit a new all-timer player peak of 73,368, nearly four years after its initial launch on the platform. And six years after its release. Fallout 76 is a game most people haven’t thought of in years, and suddenly it's a massive hit.
We’ve seen older games spike in popularity like this before. Earlier this year, Monster Hunter World’s player count spiked from 30k average to over 160k following the announcement of Monster Hunter Wilds at The Game Awards. What makes Fallout 76’s late-stage success so remarkable is that it isn’t driven by new content, quality-of-life updates, or even a sequel announ♌cement. The game’s newfound popularity is entirely driven by the positive rec🦹eption of Amazon’s TV series.
In fact, all of the Fallout games have seen a massive bump thanks to the success of the show. Fallout 4’s player count is up over 500 percent from its three year average, Fallout 3🍨 has ten times as many players this week as it has at✅ any point in the last eight years, and New Vegas, which typically peaks at around 6,000 concurrent players every week, currently has over 30,000. Even the original Fallout got a big spike in popularity over the last couple of weeks, and it’s all thanks to the Amazon show.
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Film adaptations often give the games they’re based on a significant boost. When HBO’s The Last of Us premiered, The Last of Us Part 1 jumped from number 36 to number 11 on the best-seller chart that month. When The Super Mario Bros. Movie made over a billion at the box office last year, Nintendo reported it having a positive impact on sales of a whole bunch of Mario games. Sonic has been on an upward swing since the first movie came out ✅in 2020, and even the Five Nights at Freddy’s games got a little b🅰ump in player count when the movie came out last October.
But Fallout 76 is different. The Last of Us, Mario, Sonic, and Five Nights at Freddy’s were all beloved by fans long before the adaptations came out, but Fallout 76’s entire history has been fraught with controvers🎃y, negativity, and worst of all, apathy. The game has changed a lot over the years and attracted a small but loyal fanbase, but the fact that it’s suddenly getting so much attention has little to do with the work Bethesda has put in to course correct, and everything to do with how much people enjoyed the show.
The show was so good that it made people want to give Fallout 76 a chance who had never played the game and almost certainly never would have. Over the years, the game has received 18 major updates that have slowly but surely improved the experience from the abysmal one i🌳t started with, but through all of those changes and improvements, the player count has stayed relatively flat. Even the Wastelanders update, which introduced NPCs and a well-reviewed story, was nowhere near as impactful to the game’s popularity as the show has been. Fallout 76 might have continued to l💦anguish forever had it not been for the success of the show.
We’re undoubtedly in a boom for video game adaptations, and even without this data point, it was already likely that the next few years were going to be chock full of shows and movies based on games. But the game industry will certainly take notice of Fallout 76’s success, especially if it finds a new average player count higher than where it was before the show came out - which seems more and more likely with each passing day. All of the updates and improvements 76 has seen over the years got it ready for new players, but the popularity of the show gave people a reason to want to see how much the game has improved. If game makers weren’t already trying to get their games adapted, they cer🉐tainly have a very good reason to now.
