Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella talked up how much the Fallout show bolstered the franchise after its success on Amazon streaming.
We originally found this news from an Insider Gaming report, but thought it was worthwhile to get the exact quote from the man himself.
Here’s what Nadella said about Fallout:
“Finally, we are bringing our IP to new audiences. Fallout, for example, made its debut as a TV show on Amazon Prime this quarter. It was the second most watched title on the platform ever, and hours played on Game Pass for Fallout franchise increased nearly 5X quarter-over-quarter.”
You can get a copy of the Earnings Call Transcript here (It’s the Word document.)
All the way back in April, we had some idea that the Fallout show had a serious impact on the Fallout video games. SteamDB data revealed that the games doubled in concurrent players, merely days after the show premiered in its entirety on Amazon streaming.
But that was a few days after the launch, when the show and its immediate impact would have been at its zenith. With Nadella’s statement, we now have a more complete picture of the full extent that the show affected their business.
It’s a very impressive achievement, and it only became possible, because everything lined up for the Amazon show to be as good as it is. As we found out, a lot of the people who worked on the show behind the scenes, including the producers themselves, were fans of the Fallout games themselves. And yes, that includes Christopher Nolan’s brother Jonathan.
We are sure some other producer, say, Michael Bay, or Paul W.S. Anderson, would not have bothered to make their Fallout adaptation canon to the video games. That’s a level of work that’s usually reserved for things like the Star Wars franchise. But when the Fallout producers worked this out with Bethesda, they knew it would be an extra layer that the fans would appreciate.
We won’t say that taking that extra step made the games as popular as they were, as we can’t read into the minds of those gamers who jumped back in. But clearly, if fans watched the show, and realized they were connections to the games, wouldn’t at least some of them jump back in to try to connect those dots?
But it’s likely in a more general sense, that some casual gamers, and maybe even non-gamers, got interested in Fallout for the first time. That’s the sort of thing that everyone in the industry will want to copy for their video game adaptations moving forward.
