Fallout 76 hits 17 million players, increasing its audience by 3.5 million in 2023

Fallout 76 has been played by 17 million users, according to Bethesda. The game has reached this mark in five years since its launch in November 2018.

• Bethesda announced the new milestone in a blog post detailing Fallout 76’s content support for 2024. The 17 million includes both players who purchased a copy on PC or Xbox and those who tried the title on Game Pass.
• At the end of 2022, Fallout 76 reached 13.5 million players, meaning that the game took a year to increase its audience by another 3.5 million users.
• Launched in November 2018, Fallout 76 sold 1.4 million copies by the end of that year. This was the last time Bethesda officially disclosed the sales figures, making it impossible to say how many of those 17 million players actually purchased the game.
• Although the new milestone looks impressive, it is unclear how many monthly active users, an important metric for GaaS titles with long-term support, Fallout 76 has.
• The only publicly available data on the game’s player count is its concurrent players on Steam, where Fallout 76 debuted in April 2020. According to SteamDB, the game peaked at nearly 33k CCU during a free weekend in May 2020 and is currently averaging around 7-10k CCU per day.

It is worth noting that prior to Microsoft’s acquisition of ZeniMax in 2020, Bethesda always reported sales or at least shipments (physical copies shipped to retailers). However, the studio has since adopted Xbox’s approach of only disclosing the total number of players.

The same thing happened this year with Starfield, which has been available on Game Pass since day one. It became the “biggest Bethesda game launch of all time” and recently reached 12 million players across PC, Xbox Series X|S, and Game Pass. The share of each platform, however, remains undisclosed.

Fallout 4, the latest single-player installment in the series, shipped 12 million units in 24 hours, but Bethesda has never shared its lifetime sales or player count.

Going back to Fallout 76, the game became the first multiplayer game in the Fallout series and received mixed to negative reviews at launch. Over the years, Bethesda managed to win back trust of the core audience by fixing the main issues and releasing content updates. The game currently has a 76% rating on Steam based on almost 50k user reviews.

Sold as a premium title at the base price of $40, Fallout 76 has additional monetization elements such as in-game currency and the Fallout 1st subscription ($12.99 per month), which provides its owners with various comestics and the ability to play on private servers.