Todd Howard of Bethesda Game Studios, creator of Fallout 4.
Categories

Should Bethesda’s Todd Howard bet on mobile or console Fallout games?

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 7 min

Bethesda Game Studios shipped more than 12 million copies of the post-apocalypse video game Fallout 4 during the holiday season — a stellar achievement. But Fallout Shelter, the mobile game released last June during a fan event at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, managed to hit more than 12 million downloads in a day, according to Todd Howard, creative director at Bethesda, in an interview with GamesBeat.

That’s an astonishing result, and it presents high-end game studios, known as Triple-A game makers, with a quandary. Should they continue to work on titles like Fallout 4, which took a team of 100 people more than four years to develop before it launched last November? That game just earned a Game of the Year award at the DICE Awards, the Oscars of gaming, and it generated an estimated $750 million in sales.

Unlock premium content and VIP community perks with GB M A X! Join now to enjoy our free and premium perks. 

Join now →

Sign in to your account.

Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.