‘Fallout 76’ has broken the record number of Steam players due to success of the TV show.
Fallout 76 breaks records
The Prime Video TV adaptation of the video game has achieved great success since its release. According to SteamDB, the numbers of players engaging with the ‘Fallout’ games on Steam has more than doubled since the show’s launch last week.
These record-breaking numbers are for all of Bethesda’s ‘Fallout’ games which are ‘Fallout 4’, ‘Fallout New Vegas’, and ‘Fallout 76’, the most recent release. However, the older games that were not developed by Bethesda are also experiencing an increase in player interaction but to a lesser extent.
On April 14, ‘Fallout 2’ – a non-Bethesda release - experienced a new Steam concurrent peak of 1,062 players, and the first ‘Fallout’ game achieved over 2,300 concurrent players on the same day.
It is impossible to say for certain how the console and PC versions of the games are doing in terms of increased player activity as Valve – the maker of Steam – doesn’t make those statistics available.
However, the success of the TV show suggests that the games are experiencing a surge everywhere they are available to play.
‘Fallout 4’ is the highest selling game on Steam by revenue which means it beats ‘Counter-Strike 2’ and ‘Helldivers 2’. Elsewhere, ‘Fallout 4: Game of the Year Edition’ and ‘Fallout 76’ are fourth and fifth respectively. ‘Fallout New Vegas’ is currently 11th and ‘Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition’ is 14th. ‘Fallout 76’’s new position means it rose 41 spots in the chart.
Various social media reports describe instances of people who are either playing a ‘Fallout’ game they already own or buying a new one once they have finished watching the popular TV show.
On X, SteamDB wrote: “’Fallout has more than doubled its concurrent players on Steam with the release of the ‘Fallout’ TV series.”
Bethesda is taking advantage of the increased player activity across the ‘Fallout’ games by providing a number of promotions and sales across the popular series. They have also confirmed a release date for the long-awaited next-gen update for ‘Fallout 4’ which has had consequences for the DLC-sized mod, ‘Fallout London’.
Bethesda also plans to release ‘Fallout 5’ at some point in the future, however, it is likely that it won’t see the light of day for many years as ‘The Elder Scrolls 6’ is next in the pipeline after ‘Starfield’ which is expected to be out in 2028 at the earliest.