Remember when Bethesda claimed that millions of users played Fallout 76 and they played it a lot? It seems that the statement had been heavily exaggerated, and the truth came to light only due to Sony indirectly revealing player counts.

Companies seem to be rather interested when it comes to keeping players in the dark about player base size, avoiding transparency as if it were an uncomfortable itch. One such example is Bethesda with Fallout 76, which has become the first Fallout game since Fallout 3 that has not been released on Steam, which could indirectly suggest PC player counts through Steam Charts or SteamDB.

Technically, there are other reasons, such as dodging Gaben's 30 per cent cut, but the company also managed to hide the actual sales and concurrent player numbers from the public. Bear in mind that it is indeed Bethesda's right to do so, and the logic is probably one of protecting the business by restricting the availability of certain performance-related information.

Later on, while Fallout 76 was receiving flak from all sides, Bethesda that the game had millions of players, who played it a lot. Everyone immediately suspected this to be less than truthful, but until Sony indirectly fumbling the proverbial ball, there was no empirical way to call them out on it.

My PS4 Life is a new feature by Sony that happens to show exact numbers of players that complete certain achievements in some games. Since PS4 users can also see the percentage of the player base that completed the same achievement, they can use to calculate the total number of people who bought a certain title.

In the case of Fallout 76, 33.764 players completed the Photo Bomber trophy, which can be seen as 8,3 per cent of the player base once you log in to PSN. This is enough info to calculate that 100 per cent of the player base would be 406.795.

Considering this is just the PS4 player count, which is usually the biggest one between PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, it is hard to imagine Fallout 76 managed to sell a million copies overall, let alone more.

Bethesda Fallout 76

Yes, there was an "s" at the end of the word in Bethesda's infamous , implying two million or more players play the game a lot. One has to wonder if only one statement in that sentence is false, or if it could be both. It wouldn't be the first time for Bethesda to announce either.