Nearly 9 years after release, Fallout 4 was one of the most played Steam games this weekend

The Fallout TV show is continuing to have an impressive ripple effect on its source material. Last week saw Fallout 76 hit its highest-ever concurrent player count on Steam, while Fallout Shelter saw a humble bump in player count and revenue. Unsurprisingly, the game reaping the biggest benefits from the show's success is Fallout 4. Despite it being almost nine years old at this point, it's technically the most recent mainline entry—one which was one of the most-played games on Steam this weekend.

The game's been slowly climbing in concurrents this week, according to SteamDB, before peaking at a respectable 164,190 simultaneous Sole Survivors exploring the Wasteland on Sunday. It was the ninth most-played game on Steam, raking in more folk than Rainbow Six Siege, Baldur's Gate 3 and Lost Ark. It's also approximately 140,000 more concurrent players than Fallout 4 had prior to the TV show's debut which, even without it topping the charts, is a significant number on its own.

Just what were more people playing than Fallout 4, you might ask? Well, it was narrowly beaten out by Stardew Valley—which had a peak of 177,618 over the weekend—followed by Helldivers which raked in a whopping 200,589 bug killers on the same day as Fallout 4's chart-topping number. From there you've got your usual suspects hogging the top spots as per: Naraka: Bladepoint, Apex Legends, PUBG, Dota 2 and Counter-Strike 2.

Taking a peep over at Steam's top sellers list, Fallout 4 is dominating in terms of revenue, too. It's currently ranked number four on the list in the UK, only beaten out by Helldivers 2, Counter-Strike 2 and the Steam Deck. That may have been helped by the game going for a measly five bucks right after the show's release, only going back up to the full price of $20 just before the weekend. The game's sitting one position lower in the US, being knocked down by its sibling Fallout 76. 

I can't say I'm surprised to see Fallout 4 getting a revival considering how wild everyone's been going for the show. Even me, someone who has only played a single Fallout game for approximately 10 hours, had a great time watching the show and digging into all the different lore nuggets it has to offer. Fallout 4 also just happens to be the entry our resident expert Chris Livingston reckons you should start with if you've got the itch to dive into the games, despite it not being the best of the bunch.

"But while it's not the best or my favorite, Fallout 4 is the best one to play right now," he wrote. "If I'm gonna sit down today and play some Fallout, it's definitely gonna be 4-flavoured." If you wanna know Chris's very good reasoning for that, you'll have to go peep the article yourself.