Fallout season 2 is fuelling another Steam player bump, as folks once again remember they like Fallout

While it hasn’t taken as commanding a stranglehold over the world’s collective consciousness as its debut series did, the second helping of Amazon’s Fallout TV show is succeeding in helping drive a number of extra Steam players back to the wasteland. That said, a number of said wastelands being heavily discounted as part of the platform’s recently concluded winter sale likely hasn’t hindered those efforts.

As spotted by Psycho Consuming Gamer, SteamDB’s charts since the episodes of the show started to drop on December 16th feature lines going up. Getting into specifics, Fallout 4’s gone from oscillating around the 20,000 players mark to hitting a peak of 44,000 players on January 4th, following a gradual rise over the festive period. So, that number’s effectively doubled, though it’s comfortably dwarfed by the mammoth 187,000 peak the game hit thanks to the show’s first series back in April 2024.

Beavis and Butthead pairing Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 3 have also seen bumps in the same timespan. The former’s naturally prospered more, rising from the region of 8,000 to a peak of just over 19,000 the same day Fallout 4 had its biggest recent spike. Fallout 3’s gone from averaging around 100 players to just under 200 at its version of this peak.

Then, there’s Fallout 76, the game Bethesda clearly pushed to be the intended main beneficiary of any second series player bump, with the Goggins ghoul-toting Burning Springs expansion dropping just before the show. The multiplayerpocalyspse’s numbers jumped from around 10,000 to around 20,000 with Burning Springs’ release in early December, and have since peaked at just under 30,000. For context, it hit a peak of 73,000 players with the show’s first season. These latest New Vegas and Fallout 3 numbers are similarly dwarfed by their season one marks.

That’s not too suprising. The first series of the Fallout show had that debut novelty to it and dropped at a time of year when everyone wasn’t busy with the holidays and new year celebrations. That also usually means plenty of free time, something Amazon are almost certainly banking on in terms of watch numbers.

What’s not clear is the extent to which the games being discounted in Steam’s wallet-zapping winter sale helped, but for context, Skyrim Special Edition’s player count has remained relatively close to the marks in the region of 30,000 to 40,000 players it was hitting prior to December 16th – its highest mark over the festive period was just over 46,000 players.

With the fourth episode of Fallout season two set to drop today, January 7th, we’ll have to see if the lines continue to go up as things build up to the series finale in early February.