If you’ve never played Fallout 76, Bethesda Game Studios’ post-apocalyptic MMORPG, you’d be excused for having no idea what ‘Fallout 1st’ is. It’s the game’s premium and entirely optional subscription service that unlocks a wealth of bonuses, boosts, and advantages for subscribers, and historically, some have dubbed it a ‘pay-to-win’ service.
In recent social circles, news surfaced regarding the Fallout 1st subscription service, and it wasn’t good. It was claimed by some Japanese users that Bethesda Game Studios suddenly stripped them of their paid subscriptions without warning because the service wasn’t supposed to be available to Xbox users in Japan in the first place.
Fallout 76 Subscriptions Stripped from Japanese Gamers
Fallout 76 is a premium service that the most dedicated users pay a monthly (or yearly) fee to uphold. It unlocks various benefits, such as free monthly ‘Atoms’, exclusive cosmetics, fancy base-building items, handy storage containers, and the ability to host private servers.
If you’re anyone who is sinking time into Fallout 76, you should at least consider Fallout 1st, as the quality-of-life improvements it offers for the nearly decade-old MMORPG are insane.
However, certain users can’t take advantage of those bonuses as of a few days ago.
On social media, Japanese users started complaining that Bethesda Game Studios had stripped them of their Fallout 1st subscriptions without so much as a warning. In one post on Medium, a user explained that contacting Bethesda or Xbox’s support channels resulted in a stock message being offered:
Fallout 1st is not officially offered for Xbox in Japan. There was a period when it was mistakenly available.
As the story goes, Fallout 1st rarely worked properly in Japan, for whatever reason. Suddenly, in April 2024, it popped up on the Japanese Xbox Store and stayed. Users could run their subscriptions without any issues, and it was a bountiful time to be a Fallout 76 fan within the territory of Japan.
Then, ‘around New Year’s Eve’, players started explaining that their subscriptions had been stripped from their accounts without any warning. If you have Fallout 1st, play for hundreds of hours, and then lose Fallout 1st, it can have a pretty dire knock on your experience, especially when it comes to storage of junk, ammunition, healing items, and so on.
On Reddit, one user explained the situation quite nicely:
playing this game without fallout 1st is such a nightmare, and japanese are one of the biggest population contributor in xbox oce/sea region server, if the region lose them it will be kinda dead
It was reported that PlayStation 5 and Steam-based users have no issue running their Fallout 1st subscriptions in Japan.
As detailed by Automaton, a Japanese outlet, no official explanation has been offered by Bethesda Game Studios or Microsoft to explain why the service was a) suddenly made available, and b) removed from the grasp of Japanese users without warning.
Have you been impacted by this Fallout 1st issue? Let us know what you’ve lost on the Insider Gaming Discord server.
For more Insider Gaming coverage, check out the news that a weird new ARC Raiders exploit has surfaced
Grant has been gaming for 30+ years and in the industry for 10+. You'll probably find him playing a post-apocalyptic game or an extraction shooter somewhere.
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