The Bethesda Game Studios IP series is now preparing for its second season on Amazon, and its success has had an impact on the games, bringing in extra cash for Microsoft-owned Bethesda.
The Witcher series on Netflix has also significantly increased demand for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. In the case of Fallout, we also see that Fallout 4 (which has seen the release of the Fallout: London mod has been postponed indefinitely due to the release date of Fallout 4’s next-gen update), Fallout 76, and even Fallout: New Vegas have seen increased sales. VG Insights attempted to calculate how much revenue these have generated.
They estimate that Fallout 4 had 2 million sales, which brought in about $22 million, while Fallout 76’s 1.5 million sales brought in about $16 million, and in-game spending (or microtransactions, in other words) added another $12 million. Add to that the $30 million Bethesda got from Amazon just for licensing the IP. That brings the total to about $80 million that fell into Bethesda’s lap. And that doesn’t even include Fallout Shelter, the mobile game that VG Insights estimates could have brought in another $5-10 million for the company. In fact, it could be even higher, as Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas were not included in the analysis, with the latter being a frequent UK top 10 and Steam bestseller.
So it could have been as much as $100 million for Bethesda, which isn’t a lot, but since Fallout 76 was released almost six years ago, it was effectively free money for the publisher, who essentially had nothing to do with it. So it’s no wonder that transmedia IPs (those that aren’t tied to a single genre, in our case just games) have a lot of potential.
Source: WCCFTech, VG Insights
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