Fallout 4 sales to be in excess of $750 million with 12 million copies on launch day alone

Surprise! Fallout 4 sold well.

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Bethesda Softworks has announced Fallout 4 has reached record sales across Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC that includes approximately 12 million units launched worldwide to meet day-one demand, which represents sales in excess of $750 million. The Fallout 4 Pip-Boy Edition not only sold out within hours of its announced availability, but became the fastest-selling collector’s edition of any game in history at leading retailers.

“We’re extremely proud of Todd Howard, Game Director at Bethesda Game Studios, and his experienced team of developers for their talent and dedication in creating this extraordinary game,” said Bethesda Softworks president Vlatko Andonov. “Fallout 4 is a masterpiece in game development and storytelling, providing fans hundreds of hours of fun as they explore and are challenged by this fascinating, beautifully crafted world.”

Digital sales of Fallout 4 have also broke records as it became the number one game played on Steam with 470,000 concurrent players. The Fallout Pip-Boy companion app became the number one game on iTunes, and Fallout 4 itself also set the record as the most viewed game launch of 2015, according to Twitch.

Bethesda Softworks has yet to give individual sales numbers of Fallout 4 across each platform, although we know it’s sold at least 1.2 million units on Steam alone. Regardless of what platform players decided to play Fallout 4 on, this is quite a milestone for not only the Fallout series, but Bethesda Softworks as well.

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From The Chatty
    • reply
      November 13, 2015 8:51 AM

      Damn, that's a lot of sales.

      Hey guys, remember when single player games were doomed and everything would be online multiplayer in the future? Good times.

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      November 13, 2015 9:15 AM

      Holy shit that's huge numbers.

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      November 13, 2015 10:03 AM

      [deleted]

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        November 13, 2015 10:06 AM

        I imagine the tail on PC games is longer. Skyrim was in the steam bestsellers for like 2 years. But like all other Bethesda games, it will be modders that polish this game.

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          November 13, 2015 10:07 AM

          Yeah, and countless Steam sales will mean more and more people pick it up as time goes on.

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            November 13, 2015 10:20 AM

            With that said, I'm curious to know how many Steam users added it to their wish list. We know this shouldn't count as a sale, but what we DO know is many Steam users purchase a wish listed game during sales.

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          November 13, 2015 10:36 AM

          [deleted]

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            November 13, 2015 11:07 AM

            The community does a better job of these, for free. Bethesda just needs to supply the core environment, VO and some novel game concepts, and let the community do the rest.

            I personally don't mind this arrangement, as long as Bethesda patches technical issues that arise.

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            November 13, 2015 4:46 PM

            They do by creating a platform and supporting mods. This is what make the PC version greater than all the others. We'll get weight mods, gun mods and such but a year from now the PC version will look nothing like it does now.

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          November 13, 2015 10:44 AM

          Eh, tail end sales are lower margin though

      • reply
        November 13, 2015 11:42 AM

        What's the non-steam PC market like? Like, if someone were to walk into BB or Gamestop or whatever and buy F4, is that a major source of sales?

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          November 13, 2015 11:43 AM

          oh wait, PC games do that thing now where veen if you buy a boxed copy you're essentially just buying a steam code right?

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        November 13, 2015 12:41 PM

        PC users got smarter than console users and dont buy on release day or pre-order. Or at least that's what I'd like to think

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          November 13, 2015 12:45 PM

          Heh.

        • Zek legacy 10 years legacy 20 years
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          November 13, 2015 12:45 PM

          Think again, pre-ordering means pre-loading. So if anything it's more valuable on Steam.

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            November 13, 2015 1:28 PM

            Right, but the same hesitance applies. Why pre-order and/or pre-load something if you dont yet know if it's completely broken or bad?

            • reply
              November 13, 2015 5:14 PM

              bethesda games are always shipped broken/bad. it's part of their charm

          • reply
            November 13, 2015 1:52 PM

            Preloading sucks for me. Decryption would have taken nearly an hour so I ended up canceling it and downloading it.

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            November 13, 2015 5:03 PM

            [deleted]

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        November 13, 2015 2:24 PM

        Note that it's 12 million units shipped, not sold.

        I'm sure the sold numbers are huge too, in the high single digit millions, but it's not the same as number shipped.

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      November 13, 2015 10:07 AM

      that's crazy. At least we can count on more large RPGS's from Bethseda!

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        November 13, 2015 10:32 AM

        [deleted]

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          November 13, 2015 10:55 AM

          Monkeys, they use Monkeys.

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          November 13, 2015 11:03 AM

          Or maybe a bug tracking database!

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            November 13, 2015 12:47 PM

            [deleted]

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              November 13, 2015 1:40 PM

              Yeah that has to be a QA nightmare.

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              November 13, 2015 4:17 PM

              I spent time in QA too, and it annoys me to no end when people blame bad QA for bugs or other irritating things getting through at all. I can't even count the number of bug reports I saw get bounced back as "Will Not Fix" for one reason or another.

              QA isn't the group people should be mad at for a buggy release - in all likelihood, QA did its job just fine. It's production that decided what to spend time fixing and what to let slide.

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                November 13, 2015 6:22 PM

                When people say that, what they mean is "bad organizational commitment to QA".

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                  November 13, 2015 7:04 PM

                  Some people do. Some people just assume the people working in QA aren't doing their jobs.

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                    November 13, 2015 7:42 PM

                    most people have no idea that the software they're using (games or otherwise) has 1000s, maybe even millions, of known bugs the developer chose not to fix. They just assume bugs only exist because they weren't found or the developer is too incompetent to find/fix them.

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              November 13, 2015 6:55 PM

              This is accurate.

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              November 14, 2015 4:08 PM

              Yeah I did QA for a year, I was just going for a cheap laugh with this. With sufficient resources, a QA team will log most of the notable bugs in a game. Commitment it fixing them rather than just making a launch date at all costs is a different matter.

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            November 13, 2015 5:07 PM

            There's a fantastic post on reddit going into the details, from a former Bethesda employee, on how their ship baby, ship baby, ship! attitude results in buggy messes at launch and why they don't improve fundamental systems that at least function, if not well.

            https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/3s6oow/jeff_gerstmann_fallout_4_is_a_technical_mess_on/cwvn2nl?context=4

            Here's the entire thing, it's massive.

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              November 13, 2015 7:41 PM

              he mentions something there that I felt recently as well. Bethesda's advantage used to be the scale of their worlds compared to everyone else, offsetting mediocre story, combat, whatever. But other companies are catching up for a variety of reason (some of it appearing to be related to technical issues and process like engine development) and they may find themselves in an awkward spot 5 years from now where simply having an enormous world for Skyrim 2 is not the feat it once was.

              In many ways I feel this is the same problem that beset the MMO industry. WoW hit at a time when most people had never seen a game of that scale. We all know MMO combat was shitty, there was no good story, tons of grind/filler compared to single player RPGs, etc but the scale was incredible. A bunch of MMO developers kept trying to copy this formula but the fundamental limitations of MMOs constrained their systems (like combat and narrative) while the novelty of enormous worlds wore off.

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              November 13, 2015 7:52 PM

              That read like he's butthurt or something

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          November 13, 2015 1:49 PM

          To me, the facial animation is fine, its not witcher or la noire, but its fine.

          Now the rest of the animations... Shit was bad when oblivion came out.

    • reply
      November 13, 2015 11:46 AM

      Perspective: Skyrim sold about 20 million copies over its entire lifespan.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games#Multi-platform

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      November 13, 2015 1:27 PM

      oh wow is this really sold or shipped?

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        November 13, 2015 1:32 PM

        Shipped.

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          November 14, 2015 4:09 PM

          I can't wait until we're all digital an publishers can track sales far more easily. Shipped copies is such a weird metric.

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      November 13, 2015 1:36 PM

      Thats a lot of nuka cola

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      November 13, 2015 3:25 PM

      RIP PC

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      November 13, 2015 4:18 PM

      Didn't Activision release a statement a few days ago declaring COD:BLOPS3 the biggest entertainment hit of the year with $550 Million, beating out Jurassic world?

      Suck it

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