Fallout game series pulls 500 million users, Microsoft CEO tells investors

Microsoft is still crediting Amazon Prime Video’s Emmy-nominated Fallout adaptation with driving a wave of interest to the role-playing game series. In a quarterly call with investors on Tuesday, chief executive Satya Nadella cited internal metrics saying the whole series (spanning a wave of releases going back to 2008) has more than 500 million monthly active users across all devices and platforms.

That’s impressive, but it does need a little context. Fallout 76, launched 2018, is the ongoing, live-service component of the post-apocalyptic role-playing game. Fallout 4 (released 2015) is the more traditional, boxed-goods video game that still gets a lot of replay thanks to its modding culture (officially supported by Bethesda Game Studios) as much as people either drawn to the series by the show, or returning to it by the reminder.

Fallout 4 got two updates after the TV series released to positive reviews, the latest update coming in mid-May. “Fallout: London” a “total conversion mod” of Fallout 4, years in the making, stumbled out of the gate of its launch due to technical issues but its developers promise fixes are coming.

In any case, the bigger message is pretty clear: official mod support (of community modifications) for the older games pays off, and the churn of new stuff for Fallout 76 is still working. The most recent big expansion for Fallout 76 was the Skyline Valley update in June.

Xbox Game Pass helps drive the audience, too

It also helps that Fallout’s games are on Xbox Games Pass (as most first-party Xbox titles are). Nonetheless, “hours played on [Xbox] Game Pass for the Fallout franchise increased nearly five times, quarter over quarter.” Taking that at face value, that’s a remarkable spike for a game whose last completely new release came six years ago, and two years before Microsoft acquired its parent publisher, Bethesda Softworks.

Fallout was a no-question hit as a TV show, enough that Amazon has already renewed it for a second season. It all makes for a bright spot for Xbox despite an admitted drop in console and hardware revenue (quarter-over-quarter) though all three console makers (Xbox, Nintendo, and PlayStation) have been modestly declaring revenue, mainly because their flagship hardware is all four years old (at minimum) at this point.

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