Fallout 76 Breaks 1 Million Players in a Day; Whole Franchise Nearly Hits 5 Million Players in a Day

The Fallout craze continues to pay dividends for Bethesda. Earlier this week, the studio announced that Fallout 76 surpassed one million daily players across all platforms for the first time since its launch in late 2018. The multiplayer game is one of the top sellers on Steam (and elsewhere), largely thanks to various promotions and offers that have, however, since ended. On Valve's PC platform, the game reached 73.3K concurrent players last Sunday.

It's not just Fallout 76 that is surging back, though. The whole franchise has benefited from the renewed interest, and Bethesda said nearly five million players logged in a Fallout game in a single day. This aligns with the three most recent games populating the UK's Top 10 weekly sales chart. On PC, Fallout gamers are also saturating the traffic bandwidth of Nexus Mods, the most popular modding repository.

Related Story Fallout 76 Map Is Getting Bigger Thanks to the Addition of Skyline Valley (Shenandoah National Park)

The sudden thirst for the post-apocalyptic IP originally created by Tim Cain is mainly due to the excellent first season of the TV series that aired earlier this month on Prime Video. Created by Jonathan Nolan in collaboration with Bethesda's Todd Howard, the show is set in 2296, nine years after the events shown in the latest mainline installment (Fallout 4). As such, it has often been described as 'Fallout 5', since it brings the plot forward.

Amazon has already renewed it for a second season, and Embracer Group CEO Lars Wingefors just called it a 'fantastic example of transmedia', as exemplified by the sales and player counts mentioned above. As for Fallout 76 specifically, Bethesda has recently pushed a new major update on the Public Test Server. It's scheduled to introduce the first post-launch region, Skyline Valley, while also rebalancing combat with tweaks to creatures and to the weapon damage falloff at range. There's no release date yet for the Skyline Valley update.