‘Fallout 4’ A Steam Top Seller Within Hours Of Announcement [Updated]

Bethesda Softworks officially announced Fallout 4, the next in the line of hit titles, a little over a day ago, as previously reported by the Inquisitr.

The game was available for pre-order almost immediately following the release on multiple platforms (PC, Xbox One, PS4), starting at $59.99 USD.

In a few short hours, the just-announced Fallout 4 has become one of the top sellers on Steam, according to a report from Tech Times.

The game’s trailer has seen over nine million views since the announcement and the gaming world has been talking about little else since, but the most telling statistic on Fallout 4‘s hype is preorder sales statistics; Tech Times reported that Fallout 4 was already #4 on Steam’s list of top-selling games when they wrote their article. Fallout 4 has since risen to #3, displacing titles such as Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Grand Theft Auto V and the recently-released The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

That’s pretty amazing, and although nobody’s crunched the numbers yet, Fallout 4 is likely breaking records as we speak.

It’s not the most amazing part, though.

As the report from MCV shows, the previous games in the series have been put on sale as part of the announcement, and most of them have also taken over the top seller list. When you stop to consider that most fans of the Fallout series likely already own these titles, it’s nothing short of incredible. Fallout 3, a game released in 2008 which every Fallout fan probably had already played, is presently #2 on the top seller list, and Fallout 3 is likely on track to displace the #1 title, ARK: Survival Evolved, released on June 2.

MCV also notes that Amazon’s “Movers & Shakers” list shows an increase in Fallout 3 sales of over 800 percent in the last 24 hours on PS3 and nearly 650 percent on Xbox 360, among others.

Fallout 3 already topped sales charts once, when it was first released, and now it’s doing it again seven years later; that’s an achievement many developers would die for. Other companies could take a lesson from Bethesda on how to leverage a new title: while most other popular series get almost all of their sales in the first few weeks of release (with many of the world’s most popular titles effectively dying when a new edition comes out), Bethesda is possibly earning more now from Fallout 3 than ever before, all while barely lifting a finger.

Update: As of about 2 a.m. EST, Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 have been trading places on the list; Fallout 4 briefly held the #2 spot, which is now occupied by Fallout 3. Fallout 4 has fallen back to #4 behind Grand Theft Auto V in light of an upcoming feature patch to the game.

[Screenshots courtesy of Steam/Valve Corporation]