Bethesda Exec Comments On Release of Their First iOS Game, Fallout Shelter

Fallout developer Bethesda recently released their new and first iOS game, Fallout Shelter. The game was announced during Bethesda’s E3 2015 press conference. No surprise it held the third position in the top of the App Store charts for several consecutive weeks.

Bethesda Marketing VP Pete Hines was in a recent interview with GamesIndustry and he said that they was afraid to announce this game before they announce the main Fallout game, Fallout 4.

“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.'”

Since it was there first try, they were afraid of whether they will or won’t succeed in the mobile gaming world as this is their first try ever as they don’t know the ins and outs of the mobile gaming market world therefore they didn’t know what to expect when it was released.

Hines stated, “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.”

Although the game is already doing well on its own, Bethesda doesn’t plan to spend big bucks on marketing for this game but minor marketing will take place here and there. New content and updates will be released in the near future for the game so look out for any updates.

“We’re going to at some point do some marketing around it,” he explained. “At this point we’ve essentially done none. And we do have plans for supporting it going forward in the way of content, ideas we have and things we want to try… This is not meant to be a Game of War, Clash of Clans, or Boom Beach competitor. It’s trying to do something different and I don’t know whether or not I see us doing Fallout Shelter TV commercials for it. But that’s something we’ve talked about, and we tend to never rule anything out even if we say, well that’s not something we’re going to do right now.”

Fallout 4 will be released on November 10 for PS4, Xbox One, and PC. Fallout Shelter is currently only available for iOS devices with the Android port coming soon.