It’s almost always a good thing when a company releases a sequel to a highly popular franchise, and from what Bethesda says, the Fallout game that came out in November of 2015 is no exception. According to Pete Hines, Bethesda’s director of marketing, Fallout 4 sales were the highest in the company’s history.
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Considering the company has made a great deal of money on its Elder Scrolls franchise (not to mention how well Fallout 3 has done, along with Fallout 4 now), it’s no surprise that a lot of their properties are rolling in dough whenever they’re released, but considering how popular Skyrim was (and still is) when it came out, for Fallout 4 sales to be higher even than Skyrim’s is definitely an amazing accomplishment.
According to StatisticBrain, a data-gathering website, Skyrim has sold over 23 million copies during its entire life up until now, in six years. Fallout 4 has only been around for a little over one year (going from November of 2015 to now, February of 2017, making it around 15 months), but even when it first launched Bethesda had shipped over 12 million units to retailers, and nearly 1.2 million other copies were bought on Steam.
For Fallout 4 sales to be so high is almost unprecedented, as it even broke the record that Grand Theft Auto 5 set for having the most concurrent online players.
Of course, Fallout 4 wasn’t able to escape the classic Bethesda problem of being fairly janky on release; the game did get a good bit of criticism for numerous technical issues on launch, the same as Skyrim did, but all the same many people praised it as an amazing game that was well-worth the wait, especially since now Bethesda has made consoles able to play mods for it, and has done the same with the Skyrim Special Edition.
While Fallout 4’s development cycle has now ended with the release of its final DLC, Nuka World, hopefully the game has a long life in it yet.
