People like the Fallout TV series on Amazon an awful lot—we called it "the best Fallout since New Vegas"—and that seems to be having quite the spillover effect for the Fallout videogames. All of the games in the long-running post-nuclear RPG series have seen a significant jump in players, and they've also muscled their way into Steam's top-selling games chart.
SteamDB noted on Twitter (via Eurogamer) that "Fallout has more than doubled its concurrent players on Steam with the release of the Fallout TV series."
Fallout 4 is the biggest beneficiary, spiking up to more than 83,000 concurrent players over the weekend, compared to a high of 24,000 the weekend before, a few days ahead of Amazon's Fallout launch. Fallout 76 arguably set an even more impressive mark by surpassing 39,000 concurrent players on the weekend following the TV series release, a new all-time high on Steam for the four-year-old game. Fallout 3—my favorite of the Bethesda Fallouts, and I make no apologies for it—also saw a huge bounce, going from roughly 1,000 concurrents on April 7 to 6,700 a week later.
Some of that Fallout 76 surge is no doubt helped by the "free play event" that started last week and runs until April 18, but I wouldn't credit that for all of it: It's had free weeks in the past and never put up numbers like this. (It does, however, make this a very good time to give Fallout 76 a shot.)
The raw numbers aren't quite so big, but even the original games have gone way up: Fallout broke 2,300 concurrent players immediately following the Amazon series, up from fewer than 300 the weekend before, while Fallout 2 surpassed 1,000, compared to a previous weekend high of 350.
Industry analyst Mat Piscatella shared some of Circana's Fallout user numbers on Twitter, nicely illustrating the uptick:
There's also a whole lotta Fallout among the top sellers on Steam right now: Fallout 76 is in third spot, Fallout 4 is in fourth, Fallout 4 Game of the Year Edition holds 10th place, and New Vegas is just one place out of the top 10. Fallout 3 and the Fallout Franchise bundle both made the top 20.
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Hell, even Fallout Tactics managed to power its way into the top 100.
This is not unprecedented. In 2022, CD Projekt said the success of the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners anime on Netflix drove a Cyberpunk 2077 sales pop that helped deliver the company's best financial third quarter in its "entire history." Even so, it's interesting to see the boost having such an impact across the whole of the Fallout series.
No doubt nostalgia is driving a lot of seasoned Fallout vets back to the glory of the old days, but suddenly grabbing top spots on Steam's best-selling chart points to a lot of newcomers joining the party too.
Bethesda, naturally, took note:
Another good reason for jumping into Fallout 4, if not now then in the very near future, is the upcoming next-gen update, which more than a year after it was announced is finally set to arrive on April 25. That'll bring the game to current-gen consoles with all the latest bells and whistles, and will also upgrade the PC version with support for widescreen and ultra-widescreen displays, new content, and various fixes and gameplay tweaks.
Adjacent to that, there's also the very big Fallout London mod on the way—it was set to drop April 23 but the development team decided to delay it until after the Fallout 4 next-gen update to ensure it didn't break anything. Hopefully we'll have a new release date on that one soon.
If you want to dig a little deeper into the Fallout vault, we can help. To learn more about the game that sparked the beef over whether Bethesda is retconning Fallout's canon (it's not), check out our guide to having the best Fallout: New Vegas experience today, and if the classics are what you're after, this is what you need to get them up and running at full clip on modern hardware. As far as Fallout 3 goes, you might want to hold off on that one: A 2023 leak suggested that a remaster of that game is in the works, and at this point you might as well wait.
A couple more to consider, since we're talking about it: If you dig the original Fallout style but find those games a little too past their best-before date for your tastes, Wasteland 2 and Wasteland 3—sequels to the game that inspired the very first Fallout game—are excellent.
Andy Chalk
Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.
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