Bethesda Initially Skeptical About Fallout Shelter’s Success

At E3 Bethesda made a surprise announcement in which they launched Fallout Shelter, a mobile game based on the Fallout franchise where gamers were tasked to build a vault, populate it, defend it, and maintain it like Tiny Tower, Sim City, and other similar styled games. It proved to be a massive hit, but understandably the company was a little skeptical about its viability at the start.

Speaking to Gamesindustry.biz, Bethesda’s Pete Hines was candid about the potential success and viability of the game. “To be honest, I’m not sure what we expected. It’s not like we’re a pretty well-known iOS and iPhone developer where we’ve been down this road before and it’s going to go like this. But it seemed like it ought to be pretty popular, the whole idea of, ‘This thing exists and you can go play it today.’”

Hines has a good point. Up until today, Bethesda was only known for a few franchises and was never associated with mobile, but it looks like their fears have since been assuaged. However Hines also admits that its popularity and success might have to do with the fact that the game was launched shortly after they officially unveiled Fallout 4.

According to him, “If we tried to do this last year without announcing what Bethesda Game Studios was doing [Fallout 4 for consoles and PC] and said, ‘Oh we’re doing a game and it’s on mobile and it’s called Fallout Shelter,’ we’d probably get lynched, right?” In any case it looks like the studio has found themselves a potential cash cow given that the game has surpassed Candy Crush in revenue, although it remains to be seen if the company will try their hands at more mobile games in the future.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Gaming
Tags: Apps, Bethesda, fallout, fallout shelter