The traffic of a well-known adult entertainment site saw it’s traffic decrease by 10% on the day that Fallout 4 was released.
The generally accepted way of measuring a video-game’s success is to monitor its sales or critical reception. In these regards, the recently released Fallout 4 has been excelling – shifting 12 million copies and accumulating a metascore of 88. Still, these methods don’t really account for how the game is effecting the average player. Just because they bought a copy doesn’t mean they necessarily enjoy it. Nor does the fact that professional reviewers are enamoured with it directly correlate with public approval.
This is a problem that occurs across all art forms; sales success doesn’t equate to a positive reception. For years, people have tried to find a way of reading the general response of a game, with things like imdb, metacritic and so on, all allowing for the public to vote for an average rating. Of course, even these methods are unreliable, as users regularly down vote things without playing them, create multiple accounts to vote numerous times, or manipulate the system in other ways.
Above: Pornhub’s helpful chart, depicting how gamers have responded to the Fallout’s release.
Which brings us full circle to the effects of Fallout 4. The game itself has an overwhelmingly positive response in general, but now we have a bonafide, scientific way of measuring its popularity. One that relies on hard, indisputable fact. For it turns out, that the world of Fallout 4 is so immersive, that gamers have stopped watching porn in order to play it.
Indeed, it would seem that gamers are a large demographic for the porn market, because PornHub’s Vice President (Yep, it has a Vice President) Corey Price has stated that his site saw a 10 percent drop in traffic on the day of Fallout 4’s release.
In addition to the statement, they also provided a helpful little graph (that is now on both my search history and hard-drive), which breaks down the dip in traffic. As is clear from the chart, the decrease began at 5am and continued through until around 3pm. However at around 11pm, the figures spiked dramatically. This can only be attributed to the fact that 11pm seems to be the time when gamers apparently feel the strongest compulsion to watch porn.
You might be wondering why this is important – we all are – but one thing is for sure, it does go to show that Fallout 4 has been a resounding success. Though, this probably shouldn’t be the standard indicator of popularity from now on…
