During Bethesda’s E3 press conference they announced and released their new mobile game, Fallout Shelter. The game has seen its fair share of success after reaching the top of the Apple Store charts, as well as holding the third place in revenue for several days. Despite this success, Bethesda were unsure of how well Fallout Shelter would be received. In an interview with GamesIndustry Bethesda’s marketing VP Pete Hines admitted that they needed to wait until after Fallout 4 had been announced to release Fallout Shelter. “If we tried to do this last year without announcing what Bethesda Game Studios was doing [Fallout 4] 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?” Hines said. “There would be pitchforks at the gate. ‘That’s not the Fallout we asked for, you bastards!’ But doing it this way, they’re like, ‘I’m getting what I want and oh, by the way, while I wait here’s this other free thing that’s fun to play.'”
Bethesda were certain that the release date had to be after the Fallout 4 announcement, but they were still unsure how well their first foray into mobile gaming would go. The company is well known for their massive RPGs like the Fallout and Elder Scrolls franchises, but have very little experience when it comes to making mobile games. Hines talked in the interview about the companies lack of knowledge in this are; “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.’ On the back of all the Fallout 4 stuff, we thought it would do well, but we weren’t sure how well. Suffice to say, we’re pretty pleased right now with how well it’s doing.”
Hines also stated that Bethesda plan to support Fallout Shelter, with extra content and a potential marketing campaign. Fallout Shelter is currently only available on IOS but Bethesda are working to bring it to Android devices as well.