I thought that the recent surge of interest in Fallout game may get dialed back a bit once the glow of the new (very good) TV show on Amazon died down. But thanks to a well-timed update by Bethesda, interest is continuing to surge with Fallout 4 specifically, despite many problems the next-gen update this week has brought with it.
Fallout 4 came roaring back with 164,000 concurrent players last weekend in the wake of the Fallout show release, but now with the next-gen patch update, it has already beaten that with 167,000 players, and possibly more by the end of the day.
The next-gen patch fixes bugs and especially on console, adds better performance options. Fallout 4 is currently in the top 10 most-played games on PlayStation and #13 on Xbox, which for a game out in 2015, is deeply impressive. Those concurrent numbers are from Steam where the update has broken some mods for people and come with other tech challenges but still, people are playing.
I was curious about the other Fallout games that had seen big jumps last week, but did not get next-gen patches like Fallout 4.
- Fallout 76 has maintained a much higher playercount than before, but had dropped from last week’s peak, 73,000 down to 62,000.
- Fallout New Vegas has almost identical numbers, 43,000 last week, 40,000 this week, indicating people are sticking with it.
- Fallout 3 dropped from 11,000 to 8,000 concurrents but again, for a game released in 2008, come on, that’s great.
Again, the question circles back around to what, if anything, Microsoft and Bethesda are going to do with this shot in the arm to the series, and a reminder that well, people want more Fallout games. The current plan right now only seems to be more Fallout 76 content (though that 2018 game continues to age, and not always gracefully) and Fallout 5 not arriving for anywhere from 7-10 years given the Starfield/Elder Scrolls VI schedule Bethesda is on. The idea is that Microsoft should let someone else make a Fallout game, but who? And how long would that take? Even if that’s being discussed internally, we have no idea how that would actually go if it was greenlit. Still, the message here seems pretty obvious.
Hopefully Bethesda can smooth out the issues with the Fallout 4 next-gen update, but it’s clearly always doing what they intended, boosting that playerbase beyond even what it saw from the Fallout show surge itself.
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