Since the release of the Amazon Prime Video-exclusive Fallout series, Fallout games have seen a spike in player count with Fallout 76 breaking its concurrent player count on Steam. The only reasonable explanation is that players are comparing the series with the game.
The Amazon Prime Video series was released on April 12 to widespread critical acclaim. Its average score at the time of writing was 93% on Rotten Tomatoes and 73 on Metacritic. Soon after the release of the video game-inspired series, SteamDB recorded a spike in the number of concurrent players on several Fallout titles.
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Fallout games (particularly Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and Fallout: New Vegas) have seen a rise in player count since April 12 when the TV series was launched. The three games saw their biggest concurrent player counts (83,491; 39,455; and 19,297 respectively) on Sunday, April 14, 2024.
Understandable. After finishing the series I've been wanting to play a Fallout game since
— Taz (@taz00ka) April 14, 2024
The TV series stars Ella Purnell, Walton Goggins, and Aaron Moten, and was mostly shot in New York. However, additional filming took place in Utah. Last week, it was announced that the show had been renewed for a second season, according to a report by Variety.
This time, filming will be done in California as part of a tax incentive. The California Film Commission revealed last week that it awarded $152 million in tax incentives to multiple shows, and Fallout got the largest chunk.
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“Based on one of the greatest video game series of all time, Fallout is the story of haves and have-nots in a world in which there’s almost nothing left to have,” read the series’ official description.
“200 years after the apocalypse, the gentle denizens of luxury fallout shelters are forced to return to the irradiated hellscape their ancestors left behind — and are shocked to discover an incredibly complex, gleefully weird, and highly violent universe waiting for them.”
Comparison between Fallout games and the series
While several live adaptations of video game stories have failed in the past, recent attempts have been more successful. Last year, we had The Super Mario Bros. Movie and The Last of Us series which were both massive successes in their respective rights.
However, gamers always try to make direct comparisons whenever there is a live adaptation of video games. Besides going back to play old Fallout games, GameBaba Universe found some posts that tried to make a direct comparison of both.
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“Ok, let’s run some data here,” wrote Many A True Nerd on X, starting a long thread that made a direct comparison of different aspects of the Fallout games and series. “The Fallout TV series presumably runs by Bethesda rules, and thus we can reasonably assume the ratio of XP-from-combat to XP-from-quests is going to skew heavily towards combat. This works against Lucy’s leveling speed.”
“However, Lucy’s issues with water seem to indicate she’s playing on Survival Mode, which yields XP and level-ups MUCH faster.
“In addition, Lucy indicates that she has tagged skills (repair, science and speech). This suggests she’s operating under a Fallout 3 mechanical framework, and thus game difficulty would impact XP yields.
“This is hard to evaluate, but based purely on how easily that bear went to a 10mm pistol, we have to assume the TV Series is being played on a low difficulty, which is inconsistent with survival mechanics, so I guess we have to also assume the TV series is a modded playthrough.”
Earlier this month, video game retailer, GAME, surveyed 650 clients in the UK. The result showed that most players are skeptical about the live adaptation of video games into movies or series. There is an ongoing debate about the adaptation of interactive media into live action. Some gamers believe that the process of adaptation waters down the experience—and don’t like the idea.
