TL;DR: Film and TV adaptations have become gaming's most powerful organic discovery channel, with the Fallout show driving a 600% player spike that permanently raised the franchise's sales floor, the Mario movies lifting sales of games as old as 2017 by 1.3x, and Iron Lung proving the pipeline works for indies too.

With The Super Mario Galaxy Movie crossing $747 million worldwide and already sitting as 2026’s highest-grossing film, and another high-profile gaming film releasing today, it felt like the right time to look at something I’ve been tracking for a while.

Film and TV adaptations of video games have gone from industry punchline to one of the most powerful organic discovery channels in gaming. And if you haven’t been paying attention, the data backing that up will blow your mind.

Let’s walk through what we actually know.

The Numbers Tell a Consistent Story

Whether we’re laughing along with the grim satire of Fallout, sobbing over The Last of Us, or simply fist-pumping to the nostalgia of the Super Mario films, we’ve seen gaming media go from cultural outlier to Hollywood’s next lifeline in a shockingly short amount of time.

Let’s take a look at a few critical examples, and see what we can learn from them.

The Last of Us

When HBO’s The Last of Us premiered in January 2023:

• Sales of The Last of Us Part I on PS5 jumped 238% week-over-week in the UK.

• The PS4 remaster spiked even harder, up 322%.

These were games that had already sold 37 million copies combined before the show aired.

PlayStation’s SVP of Marketing Eric Lempel later said that every time an episode dropped, game sales increased “very dramatically,” calling the relationship symbiotic.

The bump wasn’t a one-week curiosity, either.

Last of Us Remastered players jumped 417% the following month, and the franchise’s monthly user counts didn’t return to pre-show levels until the summer.

Fallout

The Fallout TV show on Prime Video, which premiered in April 2024, produced results that were arguably even more striking.

• Todd Howard said daily active users across all Fallout games ballooned over 600%, calling it “beyond anything I’ve ever seen in my 30 years of doing this.”

• Fallout 4, a singleplayer game released in 2015, saw its Steam player count spike by roughly ten times, at one point averaging just under 200,000 daily players.

• Fallout 76 hit an all-time concurrent player record of 43,887 on Steam, up from a typical average of 7,000 to 10,000.

• Fallout 4 sales in Europe surged 7,500% in the week following the premiere.

• Even the original Fallout from 1997 saw its concurrent player count jump from under 300 to over 2,300 - a nearly 8x increase.

And here’s the part that matters most for anyone thinking about long-term organic discovery. G2A’s data across the two seasons of the Fallout show (2024 and early 2026) showed that the sales spikes weren’t just temporary.

Sales between seasons stabilized at a baseline significantly higher than the pre-show era.

In other words, the show permanently onboarded a new audience.

Sales in the month before Season 2 premiered were 78% higher than the prior quarter’s average, suggesting that anticipation alone was driving discovery before the second season even aired.

Cyberpunk

Cyberpunk 2077 tells a similar story from a different angle.

When the Edgerunners anime launched on Netflix in September 2022:

• Concurrent players on Steam jumped from roughly 10,000-15,000 to a peak of over 85,000.

• The game hit number one on Steam’s sales chart.

• CD Projekt reported that the quarter was “the best third quarter in our entire history,” with revenue up 70%.

• The game crossed 20 million copies sold shortly after, up from 18 million just months earlier.

Two million copies were moved in a matter of weeks, largely because an anime brought players back to a game they’d written off after its disastrous 2020 launch.

The Mario Films

Nintendo has been the most deliberate about using film as a discovery channel, and they have the clearest data to show for it.

After The Super Mario Bros. Movie earned over $1.36 billion at the box office in 2023, Nintendo reported that global sell-through of Mario titles increased 1.3x year-over-year and new unique users of Mario-related mobile apps increased 1.4x.

The five games Nintendo highlighted were all years old at that point:

• Mario Kart 8 Deluxe

• Super Mario Odyssey

• Super Mario Maker 2

• New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe

• Super Mario 3D World

All saw measurable sales lifts from a movie that had nothing to do with any of them directly.

Nintendo of America president Doug Bowser called it a “halo effect,” noting that it showed up in re-engagement with existing content, purchases of new software, and even merchandise.

Nintendo has since pushed even harder into film, with The Super Mario Galaxy Movie already at $747 million and a live-action Legend of Zelda film in production for 2027.

They’ve said publicly that they’re pursuing movies because there are “only so many” people who play games, and film expands the addressable audience for their IP.

The Sonic Films

Sega’s approach with the Sonic movies has been less about driving sales to specific games and more about rebuilding brand value across the entire franchise.

The three Paramount films have grossed over a billion dollars combined, and Sega has credited the movies with accelerating the growth of the Sonic IP overall.

By 2024, total franchise unit sales and downloads had reached 1.77 billion.

The Sonic the Hedgehog 3 film even impacted the retro games market, with resale prices for Sonic Adventure 2 on Dreamcast jumping from $140 to over $210 and Shadow the Hedgehog doubling in value across all platforms.

When a movie makes people want to buy a 23-year-old game for $210, that’s organic discovery operating at a level that no marketing budget can replicate.

Iron Lung: The Indie Case Study

Every example above involves a major franchise with decades of brand recognition behind it. Iron Lung is different, and that’s what makes it so interesting for anyone working outside of AAA.

Iron Lung is a short horror game made by solo developer David Szymanski, originally released in 2022 for $6. It’s about an hour long. You pilot a windowless submarine through an ocean of blood. It had a dedicated following in indie horror circles, but it was not a mainstream game by any reasonable definition.

Then Markiplier, a YouTuber with 38 million subscribers, self-financed and directed a film adaptation.

The movie cost roughly $3 million to produce and had essentially no traditional marketing budget.

Markiplier handled distribution himself, reportedly getting the film into 3,015 theaters partly by leveraging fans who worked at theater chains.

The film earned $8.9 million on its opening night, $18.19 million on its opening weekend, and has since grossed over $50 million worldwide against that $3 million budget.

The game’s developer, David Szymanski, posted just three words on Twitter when he saw the numbers: “What the fuck.”

Iron Lung matters because it proves the adaptation-to-discovery pipeline isn’t reserved for franchises that already have 81 million copies sold.

A solo indie developer’s $6 game became the source material for one of the most profitable films of 2026, and in doing so, put that game in front of tens of millions of people who had never heard of it.

The film is now actively pushing people toward a PS5 port and Android release that came out in late 2025.

This is organic discovery at its most potent, and it was triggered not by a publisher’s marketing department but by a creator who loved the game enough to make a movie about it.

What Doesn’t Work

Not every adaptation drives discovery.

The Halo TV series on Paramount+ is the clearest counterexample.

When the first season launched in 2022, game sales reportedly jumped over 1,000% from pre-show levels, but that was from a very low baseline and the effect was short-lived. When the second season aired in 2024, it barely moved the needle on game sales at all. The show itself drew significantly fewer viewers than Fallout or The Last of Us, and mixed reception from the core fanbase likely limited its ability to function as a discovery tool.

The Uncharted movie tells a similar story.

Despite reasonable box office numbers, it didn’t produce a noticeable sales bump for the Uncharted games.

Quality and audience reception clearly matter. An adaptation has to make people want to spend more time in that world, and if the adaptation itself doesn’t land, the pipeline shuts off.

What This Means for Organic Discovery

There are a few conclusions worth pulling out of all of this for anyone thinking about how players find games.

The first is that the adaptation-to-game pipeline is real, measurable, and in many cases permanent.

The Fallout data is the most compelling evidence of this. The show didn’t just spike interest. It created a new floor for ongoing sales that persisted between seasons and even grew in anticipation of Season 2.

That’s not a marketing campaign. That’s a structural change in how many people know about and care about your game.

The second is that the pipeline works regardless of how old your game is. Age doesn’t seem to matter if the adaptation is good enough to make people curious about the source material.

The third, and the one I find most exciting for the indie and AA space, is that you don’t need a billion-dollar franchise to benefit from this. Iron Lung proved that a solo developer’s game can become the foundation for a massively successful film, and that the relationship between the two can be genuinely symbiotic. The key ingredient wasn’t budget or brand recognition. It was a creator with an existing audience who cared deeply about the source material.

For indie developers, this reframes the question of organic discovery in an interesting way.

The traditional playbook is trailers, Steam wishlists, streamer outreach, and social media. Those are still the basic foundation of any successful indie launch.

But the most powerful organic discovery events we’ve seen in the last few years have come from outside the games industry entirely. A TV show. A movie. An anime. A YouTuber who loved your game enough to turn it into a film.

These are less about the specific marketing activations you plan before launch, and more about the relationship you build with your players after.

You can’t plan for that, exactly. But you can build games that are rich enough in world and tone that they invite adaptation.

You can cultivate relationships with creators who have audiences of their own.

And you can pay attention to the fact that the most potent discovery channel in gaming right now isn’t a storefront algorithm or a marketing spend. It’s someone outside of games falling in love with your world and bringing their community with them.

The game has supposedly sold roughly 1.2 million copies, pulling in about $55 million in gross revenue from sales. That figure comes with caveats in both directions.

On one hand, it doesn’t include revenue from in-game microtransactions, which could pad the total. On the other hand, it doesn’t account for the cut that platforms like Steam take off the top, which pulls the real number down. Bungie avoids platform fees on PlayStation, since Sony owns the studio outright, but an estimated 70% of Marathon’s copies sold on Steam, which largely negates that advantage.

Set that less-than-$55 million gross against a development budget reported to exceed $200 million, then zoom out and remember that Sony acquired Bungie for $3.6 billion.

The gap between what was spent and what came back is significant.

By any reasonable measure, the Marathon launch has been a difficult one for Bungie and Sony. And that matters, because Bungie practically invented the console-facing live service game. PC and mobile had been doing this for years with free-to-play and MMOs, but when Destiny launched in 2014, it popularized many of the mechanics that underpin live service games as we know them today.

It leads to a fatalistic question:

If Bungie can’t launch a successful live service in 2026, who can? Is the whole live service market doomed?

I say no - At least, not quite. And to understand why, I want to talk about another story that played out in games this past month.

The Peak Paradox

As the world was talking about Marathon, another story was dominating the conversation in the indie space.

Peak co-developers AggroCrab and Landfall Games announced they’d be winding down support for their hit with one final update, and parts of the community went into an uproar.

That uproar came from a place of love. Players adore Peak. Millions of people, myself included, have made genuinely wonderful memories goofing around in one of the pioneering “friendslop” games, using it almost as much as a social lobby as an actual game.

Big updates like the BBNO$ concert kept the social hub feeling vibrant and alive. So when the developers said they were moving on to new projects, players felt like something important was being taken from them.

Think about what that means. Peak was so well-tuned to its audience, so perfectly aligned with what its players wanted, that those players were practically begging for it to become a live service game, even though it never was one.

So what separates Peak from Marathon, aside from the obvious genre gap?

The Budget Equation

The first and most glaring difference is budget.

Sony and Bungie spent upwards of $200 million on Marathon. The Peak developers spent somewhere around $200,000.

Abstracted enough, game budgets come down to a pretty simple equation: How many people are working on the game, and for how long?

Bungie had hundreds of employees working on Marathon for roughly half a decade. Peak had a tiny team, and according to the developers, most of the core mechanics came together during a game jam in February 2025. The full game shipped just four months later in June 2025.

Part of the motivation for that approach was co-developer AggroCrab’s burnout with long development cycles on previous projects like Another Crab’s Treasure and Going Under.

We see the same pattern in other successful friendslop hits. RV There Yet came together in about four months of development before hitting Steam.

Short development cycles and the low budgets that follow from them are quietly paving the way for sustainable games development in the west, whether the end product is a live service or not.

Product Market Fit

Budget isn’t the only thing separating these two games, though. The other factor is product market fit.

Peak’s players love its silly sandbox gameplay and its low-stakes metagame. It’s the perfect environment for goofing off and catching up with friends.

Once the developers discovered that joyful nugget at the heart of their game, they leaned all the way into it.

Booking BBNO$ for an in-game concert was a masterstroke, because he’s a fundamentally silly artist who resonates with online culture and matches Peak’s goofy, chronically-online energy. The developers could make that kind of move precisely because their budget was low. They could carve out a specific niche and serve the hell out of it.

Marathon is a different animal.

• The game is neon-soaked and visually divisive.

• Its gunplay is tense, precise, and unforgiving.

• Death carries a heavy consequence.

It’s hypercompetitive and not particularly welcoming to newcomers. For what it’s worth, I think it’s fantastic.

It would work brilliantly as a game with a budget below $25 million, built for a dedicated audience who wants exactly that kind of experience.

But Marathon had a budget north of $200 million.

The game’s identity and its budget were fundamentally incompatible.

Somewhere along the way, there was a failure to validate the market size and demand for a game of this nature, or a failure to align the game’s mechanics with the audience it needed to win over in order to turn a profit. Possibly both.

So, Who Can Succeed in Live Service?

There are really two answers to the question posed in this article’s title.

The first is that Bungie absolutely can ship a successful live service game, provided they match their budget, their gameplay, and their target audience properly. They remain one of the most talented development houses on Earth, and I genuinely hope they get the chance to follow up Marathon with something that plays to their strengths.

The second answer is that to get there, Bungie and the rest of AAA will have to take cues from the indies who are pioneering in this space right now.

That means:

• Unique concepts.

• Tight development timelines.

• Strong product market fit.

• A willingness to find a specific audience and serve them better than anyone else can.

The tools to build a thriving live service game are sitting in plain sight. They just happen to be in the hands of teams working with budgets that wouldn’t cover a rounding error on Marathon’s spreadsheet.

So at the end of the day, the live service market isn’t doomed. But the model that spent $200 million chasing it might be.

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