Looks like the gaming world will have the last laugh this time. Or maybe there wasn’t enough nudity to cause too much of a ruckus when it happened.
In August, seven minutes of the record-breaking and then unreleased Fallout 4 appeared on Pornhub. The footage was obscured by journalists, gathered in a room at Gamescom to get a sneak peek of the new game, despite the explicit requests of the game’s maker, Bethesda. It was low-quality footage, but it was enough to rattle the company.
“Snippets of the video show the game’s unnamed hero mowing down a horde of zombies and aiming through sights on an automatic weapon, then later, accessing computer terminals, lock-picking, and interacting with this Pip-Boy,” according to Gamespot, which reported the breach in August and decided not to link to the footage on Pornhub due to concerns that the link might be covering spyware. The seven-minute video had been pulled from YouTube and other sites, but not Pornhub.
Fast-forward to last week, when the game and its 400 hours of content was released.
It’s not enough that people are calling in sick to work to play the game. It turns out other activities are also falling by the wayside: Pornhub’s traffic fell 10 percent in the days after the game’s release.
“On November 10, traffic started to drop at around 5 a.m. after most people finished downloading and installing the game,” VentureBeat reports. “That decrease for normal patterns continued until around 3 p.m. Gamers then seamed to disappear again beginning at 6 p.m.”
For what it’s worth, Pornhub isn’t all that concerned.
“We can’t say we’re too surprised with what happened to our traffic during peak gaming hours,” Corey Price, the site’s vice president, told GamesBeat. (Forget that those hours also coincided with, y’knowe, other obligations and responsibilities.) “Based on the data, it looks like a huge surge of people decided to indulge in some wasteland wandering by taking the day off of work and school to play, while the rest of the world had to wade through what we assume were the longest hours of work ever in anticipation of some alone time with their consoles.”
Price adds that he doesn’t blame people who would normally be scrolling his site for… um… distraction for looking to Fallout instead. “We would have done the same,” he says. Plus, traffic for the adult entertainment site surged upward around 11 p.m. on November 10th.
As for Fallout, the game’s maker reported some 12 million copies of the eagerly anticipated game were shipped by release day, with more than 400,000 people playing the game simultaneously.
A quick Google News search for “Fallout 4” turned up more than 21 million results within five days after the game was released, on topics ranging from cheats and shortcuts within the game’s world, set in Boston 200 year after a nuclear war, and tips on how to “open up to companions and begin romantic encounters to obtain additional in-game bonuses.” That last one? From the International Business Times. For real.
There’s another quirk of the game, by the way: The Boston Red Sox and Major League baseball are angry about a modification that brings player David Ortiz into the world in his full uniform.
A fan named Richie Branson decided it made sense to include someone from the Red Sox in the game, considering its Boston setting. Officials from MLB told the Boston Globe that the move “is an infringement of our rights. We plan to enforce those rights.”
In his defense, Branson said he just wanted to make the game feel more authentically Boston-based. “Basically, I think it was the only thing missing from the game,” the Texas-based developer told the Globe. “You’ve got Fenway Park, the Green Monster, and all of Boston, but there aren’t any Red Sox jerseys.”
It just makes sense for a game that features the home of the Red Sox to include some of the team’s players, he adds. Plus, people have been modifying games for years, so what’s the big deal? “People are non-commercially modifying games all the time,” Branson said.
As of Sunday evening, Nov. 15, the modification was under review and not available for public use. Maybe MLB already struck Branson’s homage out of the game.
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