If Bethesda decided to ditch consoles and PCs for mobile gaming, I honestly wouldn’t be able to blame it. According to new data from SuperData, the Fallout Shelter game that Bethesda released for iOS after E3 managed to pull in more than $5.1 million in its first two weeks. Keep in mind that this was in just TWO WEEKS, and the game hasn’t even been released on Android yet!
Bethesda’s Fallout Shelter, the mobile game tie-in to the upcoming Fallout 4 where players manage an underground vault full of nuclear apocalypse survivors, made more than $5.1 million in its first two weeks on the iOS App Store according to sales tracking organization SuperData. Perhaps even more impressively, that moolah is all from optional in-app purchases, as the game is free to play. For some context, Fallout 3, the last Bethesda-developed go-round in Fallout’s unique ’50s-style wasteland, sold 610,000 units in its first month according to the NPD Group. Cut that in half (which is the best way we can estimate its two-week sales, since such data is otherwise heavily-guarded by publishers) and we get $18.3 million made, assuming each copy was sold for $60. Fallout Shelter’s two-week launch would be just shy of one-third of that amount. So if you ever find yourself asking, “why is (your favorite developer) focusing on mobile games,” making $5.1 million in less than two weeks might be part of it.