When the second season of the Amazon series Fallout premieres today, a unique distribution arrangement via Samsung Gaming Hub will accompany it. Consumers can access the first season of Fallout for free, while season two can be streamed through a Prime Video subscription and, most importantly, a video game within the franchise, Fallout 76, can be played through the hub’s Xbox app.
It’s certainly convenient for the latest media formats of a franchise like Fallout to be available in one easily accessible smart-TV display. Achieving reciprocal engagement from format to format is the challenge.
Throughout 2025, updates to Bethesda’s Fallout 76 online game never quite impacted the series’ streaming performance, according to Luminate Streaming Viewership (M) data.
Rather, a notable spike came in May after the show’s third-season renewal and second-season premiere date announcement, another spike in late August coincided with the first teaser trailer, and a full trailer in November caused viewership to surge dramatically.
That isn’t a knock on Fallout 76; however, the franchise’s mainline releases are what the show draws from most. While not an outright adaptation of any game title, the Fallout show’s story is canonical with the games and has changed locales from a destroyed Los Angeles in the first season to the New Vegas desert in season two, the eponymous location of 2010’s Fallout: New Vegas. Even more, the mysterious Mr. House character from that game is now part of the show.
But as much as Amazon shells out to make Fallout’s live-action, shot-on-film aesthetic and action feel as immersive as the medium from which the show originated, the core game series is on an abnormally long hiatus. Fallout 4, the last main entry, turned a decade old in 2025, while Fallout 5 is planned but far from anything beyond conceptual development.
Bethesda Game Studios, which became part of Xbox owner Microsoft when its parent ZeniMax was acquired in 2021, kept the next Fallout sequel on the back burner in order to get Starfield done in 2023.
It now has to finish a new Elder Scrolls, which has no release window and was absent from the Game Awards’ many trailer reveals last week. AAA games at the scale of these titles typically take five or more years to make and are prone to multiple release delays.
Obsidian Entertainment, which developed New Vegas and the first Fallout game, is also part of Xbox, maintaining a high output of releases since its 2019 sale to Microsoft. Still, it has focused on launching new IP including The Outer Worlds, Avowed and Grounded, the last of which has a sequel in early access.
Even if Obsidian could theoretically take a new Fallout title on its plate, the sheer degree of cost cutting, studio closures and layoffs across Microsoft Gaming after it acquired Call of Duty owner Activision Blizzard for $75 billion makes it unlikely any studio there has room for a property as large as Fallout’s open-world experiences.
Xbox’s availability on practically every device one can think of does make Fallout an ideal IP for cross-media synergy. But maximizing the show’s hit status without a new release in sight underscores the harsh reality of balancing big-budget projects across mediums.
