Fallout TV show sparks a surge in popularity for the games on Steam

Player counts for the Fallout games on Steam have noticeably risen over the weekend, no doubt thanks to the release of Amazon’s Fallout TV show.

The Fallout show premiered on Wednesday, April 10 on Amazon Prime video and, barring some initial fan concerns about it rendering Fallout: New Vegas non-canon (it doesn’t), it has proven immensely popular, with some considering it one of the best video game adaptations ever made. Naturally, this has led to a sizable uptick in players for the Fallout games over on Steam. In fact, SteamDB reported on Sunday, April 14 via X (formerly Twitter) that the series had more than doubled its concurrent player count.

There’s obviously no way to tell how much of these players are newcomers who were introduced via the TV show and how much of them are returning fans, but either way series developer Bethesda is bound to be pleased with this reinvigorated level of interest. 2015’s Fallout 4 seems to have benefited the most from this. While it was still courting upwards of 19,000 or so players in the days leading up to the show’s debut, Fallout 4‘s player count steadily shot up to as high as 83,491 on April 14. Console owners will soon have a reason to check out Fallout 4 too since it’s getting a fancy update for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S later this month.

Multiplayer spin-off Fallout 76 also enjoyed some newfound popularity, with its concurrent player count reaching an all-new peak of 39,455 over the weekend. Considering it was once derided and mocked for its less than stellar launch in 2018, Fallout 76 seems to have undergone a bit of a redemption arc over the years. As for Fallout: New Vegas, while it hasn’t reached the same highs, it still had 19,505 players over the weekend after initially having between 2,000 and 6,000 concurrent players in the days leading up to the TV show.

While these are the most noteworthy, they weren’t the only games to see an increase in players. Fallout 3 only had a few hundred people playing it but, after the show released, that number shot up to over 6,700. Some people even flocked to the first two Fallout games, with the first one going from only a couple of hundred players to over 2,300 in the space of a few days.

All this points to Fallout 5 having a much larger audience it needs to impress when it comes out. However, that game is likely many years away from coming out. Bethesda’s Todd Howard previously said Fallout 5 won’t start development until The Elder Scrolls 6 is finished, and that game hasn’t seen any tangible updates since its teaser reveal in 2018. At this rate, we could very well see the inevitable second season of the Fallout show come out before Fallout 5.