It's not a huge surprise because we saw this happen in 2024, but Prime Video's Fallout series has once again led to a huge uptick in people playing the Fallout games on Steam. Fallout 4, Fallout: New Vegas, and even Fallout 3 and the original Fallouts have essentially doubled their daily concurrent players on Steam since Fallout Season 2 started airing on Prime Video in December.
Via SteamDB, we can see that in the weeks leading up to the show's premiere in mid-December, Fallout 4 was typically averaging about 20,000 concurrent players, but as of Sunday that count had risen to over 40,000. Likewise, Fallout: New Vegas was pulling in roughly 8,000 concurrents a day, and that rose to nearly 20,000 last weekend.
Even Fallout 3, which was typically attracting a mere hundred or so concurrent players on Steam on an average day, has risen to close to 200—not exactly a towering number, but still about double what it was before Fallout Season 2 started. Fallout 76 got a bump too, up to about 30k from the usual 10-20k average, and the original Fallout saw an influx of players as well (I was one of them), climbing to over 800 players from a typical showing of a few hundred.
The Steam Winter Sale is probably partly responsible for Fallout's player gains in December, but I think it's mostly down to the show. For example, RPGs like Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and Skyrim, which also had steep discounts in the Winter Sale, all saw an increase in Steam concurrent player count in December, but not nearly as drastic a rise.
There's also Fallout Shelter to consider, which saw the biggest spike in players—though I'm sure that's due in large part to the free-to-play game getting an actual Fallout series-themed update: Lucy, Max, and Ghoul-Goggins were added to the management game a few days before the show began airing in December, along with a New Vegas themed Vault and event. I played that myself and yeah, it's pretty cool having Lucy show up at my Vault and go on missions with her positive "Okey-dokey!" attitude.
A lot of people are playing on Steam Deck, too: Fallout 4 is currently sitting at the 9th most played game on Steam Deck in the past week, climbing up 5 slots from the week prior. It jumped up 6 slots in December as well.
If only there were a new Fallout game to put all our energy into, huh? Maybe we'll get something by the time the show wraps up in 2030 or so?
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