The video game adaptations have long left behind the “impossible” sambenito. Criticism and public successes such as the recent television series ‘The Last of Us’ or ‘Fallout’ have proven that the episodic format fits especially well with the long plot developments of the games and with their very wide galleries of characters. But there is more: a recent study shows that not only those series are successful because they attract the players. The flow also works in reverse.
More spectators. According to a recent study by Ampere Analysis, screen adaptations boost the growth of the number of players by 140% on average. Among these adaptations, the average increase achieved by television series is up to 203%, much higher than films (48%). Among the first we can find series as prominent as ‘Arcane’, ‘The Last of Us’, ‘The Witcher’, ‘Fallout’, ‘Knuckles’, ‘Cyberpunk: Edgerunners’, ‘Conserje Pokémon’ or ‘Halo’. Among the movies, ‘A Minecraft movie’, ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’, ‘Super Mario Bros. La Movie’, ‘Uncharted’, ‘Mortal Kombat’ or ‘Detective Pikachu’.
To the bunker. For example, the premiere of the “Fallout” series in Prime Video in April 2024 caused a 490% increase in monthly active users (UAM) playing the franchise: 80% of the 14 million active players were new. In contrast, additional content launches for ‘Fallout 76’ previously achieved only 17% increase in UAM. It is a phenomenon that had already been detected since the same premiere of the series, when the 2015 Búnkers Construction and Management Game ‘Fallout Shelter’ received an unusual impulse almost a decade after its birth, going from giving benefits of about $ 20,000 a day to enter 80,000 dollars a day, thus increasing its benefits.
The last ones will be the first. There is a more particular case, because it adapts a narrative game, closed, without online and that had been acclaimed by criticism and public a few years before, calling the attention of non -hardcore public, that is, that the middle fan had more than known. ‘The Last of Us “experienced a 150% rise in its players base: an absolutely spectacular figure if we take into account that the series does not” complement “or expands what is seen in the games, but tells it again.
Without a doubt, it is a different phenomenon from that of ‘Fallout’: the excellent invoice of HBO production, much more mainstream That the prime video, it caught the attention of non-players. To compare: the relaunch of “The Last of Us Part II” for PS5 only made the monthly players in 70%.
And in cinemas, ‘Minecraft’. This is one of the greatest recent box office successes, and here there has been a clear feedback: the commented tumults in theaters are due to the preteen enthusiasm of the players-type of ‘Minecraft’, but the current was also in the reverse direction: the premiere in April 2025 produced a growth of 30% users of the game. Of all of them, 54% of the new players were people who had abandoned the games previously, that is, the film reactivated their interest in the game.
Some reasons. They are diverse (although we like to continue putting in the same sack to ‘Arcane’ already ‘Street Fighter’, these are adaptations for generations of completely different spectators), but it feeds the mass accessibility of television. This allows those who do not play videogames to know their emblematic stories without having to overcome the “input barrier” that sometimes lifts the technology, already later encouraged to enter them on their own.
In any case, it seems that we are living a golden era for this type of series and films: fidelity to the originals achieved with films such as ‘Super Mario Bros.’ or ‘Sonic’ was unthinkable a few years ago. The change in the interests of the public causes these products to cease to be niche, or rather, that they no longer have the need to soften the elements of the original video game to become massive products. Viodeojuegos are already an entertainment mainstream and its adaptations catapult that audience.
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