Fallout Shelter is making more than Candy Crush Saga

Bethesda’s Fallout smartphone experiment is off to an incredibly strong start.

Venture Beat reports that the recently release Fallout Shelter has knocked Candy Crush Saga from third place in the top-grossing mobile games charts. King’s title has been more or less a constant presence in third place, earning around $2.55m per day in the process, meaning that the change – even if it’s only temporary – is quite the achievement.

We’re very pleased. Fallout Shelter is doing amazingly well, with no real buildup,” Bethesda’s VP of PR and marketing Pete Hines said. To take such a light approach to monetisation compared to other free-to-play games – we felt like we wanted to err on the side of caution and make it very unobtrusive, make sure it was fun first and foremost. So far so good.”

Hines was also pleased that the company was able to keep the game a secret until the moment it was released.

We were pretty amazed we could keep that under wraps,” Hines added. Although if you’re going to keep a secret, Apple is a pretty good partner. Those guys are the kings of secrets.

[Fans] were expecting a lot of stuff, but they’re not expecting us to have an app and have it available right now. There’s a reason people do soft launches, to get to a larger audience and make sure everything holds up. There’s a risk in not doing that. But the fun of saying it’s available right now – that was too good to pass up.”