The recent release of the Fallout TV show has been a massive success - it was reported by Variety last night that within its first 16 days of availability, a whopping 65 million viewers tuned in to watch it on Amazon Prime Video. This has led to fantastic sales for many of Bethesda's Fallout games on Xbox, despite all of them launching years ago.
Speaking on the Kinda Funny Games podcast yesterday, Bethesda's Todd Howard acknowledged that that some of the company's biggest titles such as Fallout 4 and Starfield took a very long time to make, and there's a desire to "increase" the company's gaming output - but not at the expense of high quality.
"You know, they do take a long time. And so, I think one of the things that we're focused on here is obviously making sure they're of the highest quality, but also finding ways to increase our output. Because we don't want to wait that long either, right? It's never our plan, but we want to make sure that we get it right."
Despite Todd's comments here, he also used the interview to highlight all the great things that Bethesda is doing in regards to Fallout and other franchises, even admitting that he didn't "necessarily" want a new Fallout game to mark the TV show's launch - pointing out that the franchise is very healthy as things stand, particularly in regards to Fallout 76.
"I view it [as a] top-down franchise - how healthy is the franchise? How relevant is Fallout to the world? And I think we're doing really well there. And we have a whole team on Fallout 76..."
"Seeing all that response particularly to 76 that hadn't had that level of response before, I'm super proud of the team here that's been working on it."
So, the takeaway here is that Bethesda seems generally happy with the way Fallout is being handled right now alongside the TV show, but there's also a focus on trying to deliver games in a quicker time frame moving forward. After all, Starfield took the best part of a decade to make, and The Elder Scrolls 6 appears to be heading down that road too!