Popverse's top stories of the day

• Every new movie and TV series coming to Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Hulu in July 2024
• DC's Kingdom Come is getting the documentary movie treatment, with a big announcement coming in July 2024
• Marvel Studios unveils new Fantastic 4 artwork for San Diego Comic-Con

No one can accuse game studio Bethesda of not taking advantage of a good thing. As Amazon’s Fallout series hit the Prime Video library last week – after repeatedly changing its release date – the video game developer made Fallout 76 free-to-play for the weekend, which resulted in more people jumping into the Wasteland than ever before.

To be fair, Fallout 76 has had a rocky history. Its launch was plagued with bugs and design flaws, which resulted in a less-than-stellar reception from fans at the time. However, four years later, most of those issues have been ironed out, making Fallout 76 a solid entry in the ever-growing Fallout universe. As the Fallout television series generated more buzz for the franchise, the multiplayer title hit its highest concurrent player count ever on Steam as nearly 40,000 players jumped into the Wasteland.

It isn’t the only Fallout game that benefited from the series’ debut. Both Fallout 4 and Fallout: New Vegas more than doubled their concurrent player count from the previous month. The chart from SteamDB, which reports a wide variety of statistics from Valve’s Steam platform, showed that Fallout 4 has had an astronomical increase in players since the series’ release. In fact, enough people bought the game to send it to the top of Steam’s charts for revenue over the weekend.

Fallout has more than doubled its concurrent players on Steam with the release of the Fallout TV series. pic.twitter.com/eE0dQiYXQW

— SteamDB (@SteamDB) April 14, 2024

Does this mean we’ll get more Fallout episodes? Not necessarily, as this isn’t a strong incentive for Amazon to continue funding the series based solely on game sales. However, it gives Bethesda an incredibly strong incentive to keep their relationship with the studio sweet and encourage them to keep the Fallout train running.

Want to know what's coming up next in pop culture? Check out our guides to upcoming movies, upcoming TV shows, upcoming comics, and upcoming comic conventions. If you're looking for specific franchises or genres, we have all the upcoming MCU, upcoming Star Wars, upcoming Star Trek, and upcoming DC movies & TV for you. If you're a fan of superheroes and not specific to just Marvel or DC, we have overall guides to all the upcoming superhero movies and upcoming superhero TV shows (and new seasons) as well.