Fallout 76's player base might primarily be on console

New data released by Bethesda and Microsoft may indicate that Fallout 76's userbase primarily plays on consoles.

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Thanks to the Amazon Prime show, everyone is playing Fallout games, including Bethesda's infamous comeback kid Fallout 76. The studio recently confirmed that Fallout games had nearly 5 million people all playing at the same time. The live game Fallout 76 had over 1 million players all raiding and surviving in irradiated West Virginia, making up about 20% of all Fallout players.

It's likely that the majority of Fallout 76's users are playing on consoles. This is based on the admittedly limited data from SteamDB that shows Fallout 76 hit an all-time peak of 73,368 users on Steam. That means Steam PC players accounted for 7.3% of total Fallout 76 players during this timeframe at a maximum. So where are the other 926,000 players?

There's a good chance that a portion of these users are still on PC. Remember that Amazon just gave away free copies of Fallout 76 to all Prime subscribers, but these copies were for the Microsoft Store on PC, and we have limited data available for that storefront.

But given what we know about how Microsoft's PC store compares to Steam (most users pick Steam to play their PC games), Steam could have more players despite the freebies.

Even still, it's undoubtedly true that there's more Fallout 76 players on consoles than there is on PC by virtue of sheer availability on that platform. Fallout 76 is playable on both Gen8 and Gen9 systems and was released in 2018. There's also platform preferences to consider, too; PC gamers lean more towards moddable Bethesda games, and Fallout 76 isn't moddable (yet?).

This is just a reminder that consoles are very important for a multitude of games, including Fallout 76.