All four modern Fallout games catapulted into the most-played games on Steam Deck this past month

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Gee, we wonder why?

Vault Boy
(Image credit: Bethesda)

It's no secret that the Fallout show was a big success, with Amazon saying it was the streaming arm's biggest hit since The Rings of Power, with 65 million viewers. It's also no real secret that successful videogame shows make people want to play the games, but it is pretty cool to see how many go and do just that: This month's little Valve survey of what people are playing on the Steam Deck shows all four modern Fallout games taking a top 20 spot for most-played by playtime.

The whole situation isn't without precedent or anything: Back when the Witcher TV series first debuted, Witcher 3 saw concurrent player counts higher than it ever had before with sales up some 554%. It's a real lesson that you can bet big publishers are taking to heart: If you can get a TV series made you'll drive older players back to your game and boost new sales.

It's also a real point at a way you can expect these types of marquee series to stay in the public light as game development cycles get longer and longer: Release a series in that big gap between game launches. I mean, even the Fallout show's producer said 'It's almost like we're Fallout 5.'

For his part, Bethesda game development big man Todd Howard has been pretty gung-ho about the show's faithfulness to the games. 

Howard said that the experience of visiting the set for Amazon's Fallout was "surreal," noting that he "thought there'd be more movie magic, like, 'Eh, they're gonna fake a lot of stuff, a lot of it's gonna be CG,'" before coming face-to-face with the show's Vaults.

In other news, as the lore of the older Fallout games drifts ever-further into the dusty past, PC Gamer's Jeremy Laird took a look at what your very expensive gaming rig might have looked like when Fallout first released.

Jonathan Bolding
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Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.