Earlier this week, the Fallout franchise had a new addition. A tv series on Prime Video that was actually very well received by critics and fans alike. After the success of last year’s The Last of Us, video game adaptations by streaming services have another success on their hands. Running off this success, and with some well played promotional marketing, every Fallout game is having increased player activity.
Most of these games were released over a decade ago, with Fallout 3 being released in 2008, and Fallout: New Vegas being released in 2010. Both have more than doubled their player counts in the past few days. Fallout 3 moved from 500 to 3,600 players on average. Fallout: New Vegas jumped from 3,000 or 4,000 to 11,000. The most impressive though has to be Fallout 4, which peaked in players almost nine years ago, that has returned to 53,000 players compared to its 18,000 – 20,000 for the past few years.
Like The Last of Us before it, people are attributing this meteoric rebirth to the popularity of the new Prime series, and they’re not wrong. These adaptations can help introduce wider audiences to the worlds and stories of these video games, incentivizing viewers to become players. With so many adaptations in our media encouraging people to interact with stories and IPs they already enjoy in different forms, the draw of a tv adaptation is powerful, provided it’s successful. Luckily for Fallout, it seems to have been.
Live action television adaptations are relatively rare in comparison to their animated counterparts. All of the five currently ongoing ones including Fallout, The Last of Us, and Halo, are produced by streaming services. What this means for the future of these adaptations is hard to say. Will they only be in the hands of streaming services, or will some other producers appear? And the biggest question is: if and when will the public become tired of them?