Today, Bethesda Game Studios announced that Fallout 76 reached 20 million players who’ve entered Appalachia since the November 2018 launch, gaining three months over December 2023’s 17 million count. Last we heard, in late 2022, the game was up to 13.5 million players. The studio shared a brief video message in which Creative Director Jonathan Rush thanked fans alongside several other team members.
Director and Executive Producer Todd Howard also discussed the milestone in an interview with Variety:
Fallout 76 has kind of been sneaky popular for a while — but not to this level, and it’s just been really great for the whole studio.
Indeed, Fallout 76 surged back to #8 on April’s US sales chart posted yesterday by Circana, while Fallout 4 ranked #5. The whole franchise benefited from Amazon’s Prime Video show. Howard said on the topic:
Depending on the Fallout game, you’re looking at a 4-6x increase in daily players, which is beyond anything I’ve ever seen in my 30 years of doing this. Having an event that brings that many people into games that you have and who have never played your games before, that’s a big thing. New players who have never played a game or never played one of our games. It’s a really, really unique moment.
Todd Howard then highlighted that the show’s success largely rested on the well-made characters.
The one thing about TV that Jonah told me from Day One is it’s about finding the characters. And I think it’s really awesome how these characters have resonated with the audience. And so I think there’s still stories to tell there. There’s so many great characters — I love Norm and Chet, I love the two of them in every scene. And obviously, we have the Ghoul and Lucy and Maximus. But there’s so many great characters that have a lot of stories left to tell.
What about new Fallout games? We’ve reported on the rumors of Microsoft fast-tracking a new mainline installment. In today’s interview, Howard just says they’re making plans for future games.
The TV show, I feel like it took us 15 years from when I first started talking about it — but it was five years since Jonah and I first talked. And games take a good five-ish years. So we’re in plans for future games in this series and nothing to talk about right now, but we’re always planning.
Fallout 76 is soon getting a free map expansion with the Skyline Valley update currently on the Public Test Server. The patch will also rebalance combat encounters against certain creatures (Angler, Cave Cricket, Floaters, Gulper, Mutant Hound, and Protectron) while improving the falloff for weapon damage at range.
