Amazon’s Fallout success reveals a big problem with the video game business

April’s biggest video game isn’t a new release likeTales of Kenzera: Zau or Stellar Blade. Instead, it’s a series that hasn’t gotten a new entry in years.

Fallout is currently enjoying a wave of mainstream attention thanks to its surprisingly fun Amazon TV adaptation. Returning players and newly-won-over fans alike are returning to classics like Fallout 4 and New Vegas to scratch their post-apocalyptic itches. It’s the moment any video game publisher dreams of, but there’s just one problem: Bethesda can’t capitalize on the moment.

Because of the way big video games are developed nowadays, there’s little hope that a new Fallout title will launch any time soon.Fallout 5 currently isn’t scheduled to release until well after The Elder Scrolls 6, Bethesda’s current project. It’s very likely that Amazon’s series will have been over for years before the next mainline game releases. That should serve as an eye-opening moment to the AAA video game machine. While it may seem logical to keep growing the scale of projects and chase the “megagame,” that strategy comes at the expense of valuable flexibility. We may never see Bethesda capitalize on its biggest mainstream moment, and that’s a problem.

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Losing flexibility

Here’s the situation. Amazon’s Fallout became an unexpected hit when it dropped on Prime Video earlier this month. Lots of viewers were seemingly won over by its unique tone, which balances playful comedy and pitch-black, post-apocalyptic gloom. That success led to a resurgence of interest in just about every game in the series’ history. Fallout 4 is especially benefiting from that wave, as the 2015 RPG has since broken 100,000 concurrent players on Steam. That’s great news for Bethesda.

What’s less ideal is that every Fallout