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Interest in Fallout 76 Drastically Down with Less Than Half the Viewers of Fallout 4’s Launch on Twitch

Bethesda’s New Multiplayer Push isn’t Paying Off for the Popular RPG Franchise

November 19, 2018 by

With Fallout 76’s new focus on multiplayer, developer/publisher Bethesda was hoping to capture the survival/battle royale audience that usually brings in more viewers than their single player RPGs. But after its first week, the latest Fallout is looking like a bit of a bomb when compared to 2015’s Fallout 4.

Since peaking at 184k concurrent viewers on Twitch during the first day of the game’s beta, viewer counts for Fallout 76 have been on a constant decline as gamers have already begun to lose interest.

Even Twitch’s most popular streamer, Ninja, teaming up with Rick and Morty creator/voice actor, Justin Roiland, and rapper-songwriter, Logic, couldn’t turn things around with most of the 76k viewers at the end of the beta having mixed to negative feedback based on what they saw.

When Fallout 76 officially launched on Wednesday, it peaked at only 106k concurrent viewers — down 42% from the beta and down 56% when compared to Fallout 4’s peak of 243k concurrent viewers three years ago on Twitch.

What’s worse, is that Fallout 76’s numbers are already down another 55% since the game’s launch day – something that shouldn’t be happening with a title as big as Fallout during its first week — especially with the series introducing multiplayer for the first time ever.

Bethesda’s Fallout franchise is usually one of the biggest launches each year it comes out, but this year, its peak viewer count was much lower than expected… placing it at #31 on Twitch’s list of most watched games so far this year.

76’s ranking was far behind other more successful 2018 launches for games such as Call of Duty: Black Ops III (#7 w/ 508k viewers), Red Dead Redemption 2 (#11 w/ 365k viewers), and God of War (#13 /w 283k viewers). Even one of the year’s biggest bombs, Radical Heights, was able to top the latest Fallout with 196k viewers at #27.

Sadly, Fallout 76 was the first in the franchise to be released exclusively on Bethesda’s launcher, so we don’t know the exact player counts as we have with prior Fallout games on GitHyp… but the publisher’s decision to not sell Fallout 76 on Steam clearly hasn’t helped them generate more interest in their latest game and they might want to rethink their next big release.