Fallout is registering new player peaks, but who are the fans?
The Fallout show has attracted rave reviews since its launch on Amazon Prime on April 10. The knock-on effect for the games the show is based on have been immense. Various Fallout games have registered upticks and Fallout 76 has even registered new concurrent player peaks on Steam. Bethesda themselves announced on April 24 that over a million players had played the title in a single day.
YouGov data shows that opinions about the franchise are turning more positive – over the past 30 days, 17% of all Americans say they rate the franchise strongly positively compared to 14% when looking at a 12-month average.
But who exactly are these Fallout fans?
Fallout fans – defined as those who have a strongly positive view of the franchise – are a fairly young audience, not dissimilar to American gamers on the whole. What makes them slightly different is a relatively lower share of people aged over 55 – 10% vs 16%.
The gender ratio of Fallout (66% men to 34% women) is similar to that of the broader gaming audience (64% vs 36%).
A look at the types of games they play offers a deeper understanding of the audience from a gaming perspective.
Two-thirds of Fallout fans (64%) say they play action or adventure titles on PC and/or console compared to 49% of all gamers. This isn’t surprising given that Fallout is often described as an action game itself. Among others, they also over-index on massively multiplayer / RPG categories (33% vs 27%), Indie games (23% vs 17%) and MOBA titles (22% vs 13%).
On the other hand, they are less likely to have played casual (20% vs 30%), strategy or puzzle (18% vs 24%) and simulation (15% vs 22%) games.
Not only that, but their reasons for playing video games can also differ. For instance, only 42% of Fallout fans say they play video games to pass time compared to 53% of all gamers.
They’re also less likely to view their gaming experience as an avenue to escape from reality for a while, which is a stronger motivator among gamers overall (29% vs 39%). Instead, they are more likely to list habit (26% vs 18%) and the ability to interact with gamers around the world as reasons for gaming (30% vs 23%).
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Methodology: YouGov Profiles is based on continuously collected data and rolling surveys, rather than from a single limited questionnaire. Profiles data is nationally representative and weighted by age, gender, education, region, and race. Learn more about Profiles.