10 "Next Big Thing" Video Games Nobody Is Playing

4. Fallout 76

Is it cheating, putting Fallout 76 here? Just an excuse to kick it while it’s down? Honestly... maybe. The uncomfortable truth for Fallout fans though is that Fallout 4 could easily have made the list instead.

Starting with Fallout 76 though, the scandals are too many to list here. In fact, they once had a list entirely of their own, one which predates arguably the biggest scandal of the premium passes. It tried to bill itself as the next big thing, a more focussed RPG in the MMO mould, one set to unite two of the biggest genres in gaming.

Right from the start though, very few expected it to do so. Sales were so poor some stores were giving away physical copies with console bundles that already contained the digital copy. Even those who did pick it up abandoned it almost immediately.

Fallout 4 meanwhile enjoyed Bethesda’s most successful launch ever, and peaked at almost half a million concurrent players on Steam in November 2015. A year later, that figure dropped to 60,000. Not bad, but not great. After such a huge launch, Bethesda will surely be annoyed that they couldn’t kick on.