Fallout 4 launched way back in Nov. 2015, over a whole year ago, and in that time, it has quickly risen to be the biggest game that the company has ever made.
The news comes from Bethesda Marketing Executive Pete Hines in an interview on Kinda Funny Gamescast, and he directly points to the most stunning and improbable fact of all: Fallout 4 is bigger than Skyrim.
Fallout 4 has gotta be the most successful game we’ve ever launched in our company’s history. More than Skyrim, in terms of what we did…
“Has gotta” doesn’t sound too convincing, and I’m not buying it entirely yet.
Bigger than Skyrim? It certainly sold a lot faster, but not more
Currently, the sales figures point to Skyrim sitting at a comfortable 23 million copies across all of its platforms. This is over a five year period since the launch in Nov. 2011. On the other hand, Fallout 4 is currently believed to be at about the 12 million mark, but Bethesda hasn’t released any specific numbers yet.
I can’t argue with a man who knows inside information, but you wouldn’t think this is the case given the atmosphere around the games. Skyrim is beloved by just about everyone who plays it, and its success to the upper echelons of gaming was a slow burn over half a decade. Fallout 4 was popular, but as more and more played it, it began to become more polarizing with many turned off by the lack of role-playing compared to what’s found in the earlier games and New Vegas.
Hines addressed this in the interview, as well.
When you do another one, well it’s not the first one again, there’s gonna be some commonalities. Like, you can’t just react to VATS in Fallout 4 the way that you did in Fallout 3, because in Fallout 3 you saw it for the very first time. You’re like, ‘shit this is a really cool, interesting way to kind of bring targeting different body parts to a first-person shooter but in a way I understand’ […] Well how is that supposed to have the same impact in Fallout 4?
If you played Uncharted 4, and that was your first game, I think you have a very different reaction to what that game is than if, like me, you played 1, 2, and 3 because Uncharted 4 is more of 1, 2, and 3.
Again, there are no stats to say otherwise, but Fallout 4 just never seemed to have the lasting power that Skyrim achieved.
