As much as we like to harp on Bethesda for…you know, being Bethesda in recent years, the Fallout 4 player count is evidence enough that players aren’t quite done with the latest solo entry in the post-apocalyptic RPG series. This time, the season 2 release of Fallout on Amazon Prime Video did what we certainly didn’t expect – the player count rose past 40,000 on the peak days after the show dropped – damn.
The TV adaptation’s season 2 began airing in mid-December 2025, and now the rebound has finally reached Fallout 4 proper, at least on Steam. This, in turn, means that the Fallout 4 player count has actually doubled (roughly) compared to before the premiere. For a game launched in 2015, this insane spike is a stark reminder that a well-done TV adaptation can actually revive even the most ghoulish of ancient games – as seen in Fallout 4 here.
Is the Fallout 4 Player Count Something Significant for Players?
It’s a tricky question, because on one hand, the modding community has arguably kept (think Fallout London, for example) Fallout 4 alive far beyond its own shelf-life, especially in the shadow of much more successful Bethesda titles such as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
On the other hand, Fallout 4 appears to have at least some staying power within the hearts of fans of the post-apocalypse, otherwise we wouldn’t have this impressive surge in the Fallout 4 player count at all. At the time of writing, SteamDB lists tens of thousands of live players, with a daily peak of well above 30,000. This renewed attention for the franchise appears to have trickled over to Steam’s handheld too, as more players tackle the commonwealth’s dangers on the Steam Deck as well. Neat!
Now, Fallout 4 is the headline, but it isn’t the only winner. Fallout: New Vegas has also gone crazy, jumping from an even smaller (compared to Fallout 4, that is) pre-show baseline to numbers that put it back among Steam’s more active single-player RPGs on certain days.
Fallout 76, unsurprisingly, has seen an upswing as well, while older entries like Fallout 3 and the original Fallout have logged smaller – but still meaningful -percentage gains. Even a few hundred extra players can be a big deal for classics that usually sit in the low hundreds. Damn you, Todd – we bet you’re grinning at these very much unforeseen Fallout 4 player count numbers, aren’t you?
Yes, The Heavy Discounts Helped – But the TV Show Did the Most Work
As expected, these weird things rarely are as simple as they seem, as the timing strangely overlaps with the Steam winter discounts. These sales always boost game activity, especially with already well-known games. The scale is off the charts, though, so this might very well be a multi-faceted equation.
It looks like this is an instance of momentum feeding itself, in a way. The more Fallout itself is in every player’s mouth, the more the Fallout 4 player count is going to rise – it’s inevitable. Arguably, even complete newcomers can be put into the mix, since they can now pick the entry that matches the tone they want, no matter if it’s the RPG monstrosity that is New Vegas, or the post-apocalyptic settlement builder Fallout 4.
Speculation Time: What will Bethesda’s Next Fallout Move be?
We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again – as much as we love Bethesda, they’re really not known for more than 3 franchises, including Starfield, and the fact that they’ve milked, nay, drained Skyrim as an IP with more re-releases than we care to count, means that they’re probably happy about the Fallout 4 player count – but they’re not going to do anything about it.
Think about what they did to the Fallout 4 Anniversary Edition too – so don’t expect too much, trust us on this one. Fallout 5 will be ready when it’s ready, and that’s pretty much all we can expect from this – apart from the obligatory Fallout Prime show skins on the Creation Club, that is.
So if you expected that Bethesda would work even harder and faster to get you a new Fallout entry to sink your teeth into, that’s probably not going to happen, we’re sad to say. Nevertheless, the surge in the Fallout 4 player count on Steam is mighty impressive, and all in all a big win for video game adaptations on the…well, slightly bigger screen, in this case.
