I no longer believe that Fallout 76 is a failed marketing scheme or a bad product. Nobody is this inept at selling things. Instead, I now consider it to be a massive troll. Todd Howard is just sitting there at his keyboard adding in even more shit that people do not want and laughing while saying "u mad?"
I'm actually kind of inclined to agree with this. Call me crazy, but the whole debacle of Fallout 76 reeks of a "Springtime For Hitler" ploy that actually ended up succeeding.
I just get this eerie feeling that Fallout 76 was set up to fail as a high-risk/high-reward marketing ploy for The Elder Scrolls VI (and possibly Doom Eternal). Most of Fallout 76's assets were recycled wholesale from Fallout 4 and Skyrim and rumors indicate that the game was made on the cheap because it was supposed to be a quick shovelware budget side game to keep people occupied until the next major release.
They probably spent more money to license The Beach Boys and that cover of "Country Roads" than they did on the actual game itself. Which makes me think that if the game flopped, the investment was low enough for Bethesda to risk it, and if it really was supposed to have been a cheap side game to fill the gaps between major releases (similar to Fallout: New Vegas, which was why Bethesda licensed it to Obsidian) then the logic would make sense.
If the game succeeded, that would be extra money in Bethesda's pocket and if it failed, they didn't spend enough on it to be that big of a loss, it's the same logic that a lot of film studios use when they make cheapo low-budget films in-between their major releases. And tellingly, the film studios put these low-end films out during times of the year where there is less competition from other major releases (the so-called "Dump Months", with January in particular being the go-to month for shitty releases, both in film and to a lesser extent in video games)
Yet despite the cheapo nature of the game, Fallout 76 was announced out of nowhere and hyped all to hell throughout the summer of 2018 and released it mere weeks before Red Dead Redemption 2's release date, a game that was so eagerly awaited and had so much effort poured into it that it was a guaranteed lock for "Game of the Year" and indeed turned out to be the biggest game of 2018. The only other game that came out close to the same time was Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, which was mainly out of a sense of tradition (all the Call of Duty games come out around November and have since 2006) and because Call of Duty was enough of a guaranteed best-seller that it could afford to take a hit from RDR 2.
Also, unlike Fallout 76, Black Ops 4 actually had money and effort poured into it and was marketed properly.
Between the grand success of RDR 2 and the epic failure of Fallout 76, a lot of the big name studios pushed back a lot of their big-name releases to January, resulting in a lot of smash hits in a month normally reserved for low-end shovel ware. Two of the most eagerly awaited releases came out in January (Kingdom Hearts III and the remake of Resident Evil 2) and both were very successful mainly because they didn't have to directly compete with RDR 2.
With all the poor marketing, terrible gameplay, boneheaded business decisions after the initial failure, and the fact they directly set a side game up against the most anticipated AAA game of the year, it's almost as if Bethesda was setting up Fallout 76 for failure.
TL;DR-Fallout 76 is the New Coke to Elder Scrolls VI's Coca-Cola Classic.
