The Fallout series has proven so popular that not only has the entire series taken off on Steam, but now one of the world’s largest mod hosting sites is struggling under the weight of renewed demand.
Nexus Mods features nearly 48,000 mods for Fallout 4 alone, which have been downloaded more than 1.4 billion times, with Bethesda’s latest post-apocalyptic RPG being the third most popular on the site overall. While overall download numbers have settled into a regular rhythm over the years, Amazon’s Fallout series has disrupted that pattern as the number of players, and thus mod downloads, has grown so much that the Nexus is having a hard time keeping up.
Nexus Mods Community Manager Pickysaurus writes:
We are experiencing a significant increase in traffic than usual due to the popularity of the Fallout series. We have deployed additional resources where possible and are monitoring uptime and performance across the network. We have staff available at all times to deal with any problems.
Please be aware that this additional traffic may cause performance degradation on the website and our applications.
According to the Nexus Mods status page , the main site is experiencing partial outages at times, as well as slow performance of the API, forum, and content delivery network.
The explosion in popularity of Fallout games following the show’s release has been observed all week, but in the last 24 hours alone, all the main games in the series have accumulated a total of nearly 300,000 players on Steam. Fallout 4, the most popular game in the series for mods on the Nexus, also peaked at 141,154 players, so it’s no surprise that the Nexus is struggling.
With Fallout 4’s next-gen update due out in a few days, we can expect these numbers to remain stable or even increase.