Awards-season arguments usually come down to taste. This one also comes down to timing.
At The Game Awards 2024, Amazon Prime Video’s Fallout won Best Adaptation, beating Arcane, Knuckles, Like a Dragon: Yakuza, and Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft. Multiple reports published the same nominee list and winner. One recap also notes that Jonathan Nolan and Todd Howard accepted the award onstage. That same write-up says Isabela Merced was among the presenters during the show.
However, by January 2026, the “Best Adaptation” story has picked up a second chapter. The Game Awards’ official Best Adaptation nominee page currently lists “The Last of Us: Season 2” as a Winner, in its own slate. That matters because The Last of Us Season 2 did not even premiere until April 13, 2025, with weekly episodes through May 25, 2025. In other words, Fallout can accurately claim the 2024 trophy, while The Last of Us can credibly point to a later “Best Adaptation” win on the Game Awards’ own site.
So if you’re trying to answer the question the way fans usually mean it, “Which show was the best game adaptation moment of 2024?”, you’re really comparing two different kinds of dominance. Fallout owned the 2024 conversation in a way Nielsen could measure. The Last of Us, meanwhile, has the HBO-style numbers and the long-run prestige footprint that never fully fades.
A quick awards reality check: what won in 2024, and what didn’t exist yet
The cleanest factual baseline is this: Fallout took Best Adaptation at The Game Awards 2024. Reporting around the awards lists Fallout as the winner over Arcane, Knuckles, Like a Dragon: Yakuza, and Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft.
The other key date anchors the entire argument. The Last of Us Season 2 premiered April 13, 2025, at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT on HBO and Max, and ran weekly through May 25, 2025, according to a published schedule. That means it could not have been in the 2024 awards lineup.
Even so, the situation gets complicated if you stop at headlines. The Game Awards’ official Best Adaptation page now lists The Last of Us: Season 2 as a Winner, with a nominee list that reflects that later period. That doesn’t erase Fallout’s 2024 win. It does explain why the “best adaptation” debate keeps getting re-litigated into 2026, often with people talking past each other.
In practice, the fairest framing looks like this: Fallout won the 2024 trophy, and The Last of Us Season 2 later earned its own Game Awards recognition per the official site. The more interesting question is what each show did with the platform that recognition represents.
Fallout’s 2024 breakout: the binge-drop that Nielsen could measure
Fallout hit Prime Video on April 10, 2024, and quickly produced the kind of “hard proof” streamers love to cite.
Nielsen’s streaming Top 10 for April 8 — 14, 2024 recorded 2.9 billion minutes viewed for Fallout in its first five days of availability. That’s a huge figure, and it came out in the language that tends to settle arguments. It wasn’t just “popular.” It was popular enough to show up as an enormous block of time in the national measurement system that covers major streaming.
Then came the internal bragging rights. One industry report described Fallout as Amazon’s best one-week viewership ever for a Prime Video title. It also said the show beat the previous record-holder, Reacher, by more than a billion minutes in that week.
Momentum didn’t stop after the first burst, either. Another report said Fallout became the first Prime Video series to rank No. 1 on Nielsen for three weeks in a row. It also gave a specific later-week data point: 1.53 billion minutes for the week of April 22 — 28.
That combination matters. Lots of shows can open big. Fewer can open big and still put up the kind of second and third week totals that keep them on top of rankings.
Fallout also came with big, easy-to-quote global claims from Amazon. A Variety-circulated report said Amazon claimed 65 million worldwide viewers in its first 16 days. Wikipedia’s summary of later reporting adds that the series surpassed 100 million viewers by October 2024.
To be clear, “viewers” and “minutes viewed” aren’t interchangeable, and streamers don’t always define them the same way. Still, the broad takeaway is supported across multiple sources: Fallout didn’t just win an award. It landed as a measurable mass-audience hit in 2024.
The Last of Us’ benchmark numbers: HBO’s kind of hit, built week by week
The Last of Us’ biggest viewership story is earlier than 2024, but it sets the baseline for every comparison that followed.
Associated Press reported that The Last of Us drew 4.7 million U.S. viewers for its premiere. The same AP story described that as HBO’s second-largest debut after House of the Dragon. It also reported the Season 1 finale reached 8.2 million viewers, which AP described as a series high.
Then there’s HBO’s longer-run measure. AP also reported that across the first six episodes, the show averaged 30.4 million viewers, using HBO’s measurement approach.
Those numbers help explain why The Last of Us tends to feel “bigger” in certain corners of the culture, even when it is not the same kind of Nielsen-minutes juggernaut that Fallout was in April 2024. HBO’s viewing story often emphasizes appointment television and steady growth. The Last of Us Season 1 fit that model in a very visible way.
There’s also an awards and recognition footprint that supports the “prestige adaptation” label. Wikipedia’s Season 1 page states the show received 24 Primetime Emmy nominations. That doesn’t tell you which show you should like more. It does show the category of success the series was playing in.
So by the time Fallout arrived in April 2024, it was stepping into a landscape where The Last of Us already represented the high bar for video game adaptations on TV, at least in terms of mainstream legitimacy and awards conversation.
Fidelity versus freedom: two adaptation strategies, two very different risks
One reason these two shows invite comparison is that they embody different approaches to adaptation.
In a season-two scheduling story, executive producer Jonathan Nolan described the Fallout team’s intent in terms that align with what viewers see onscreen: they wanted “a new locale with new characters and a new story” while still connecting to and honoring the games. That quote is useful because it states the strategy plainly. Fallout isn’t a direct retelling. It’s an expansion, built to feel like it belongs in the universe.
That approach carries a specific risk. If you go “original story,” you can’t lean on existing plot beats to do the heavy lifting. You have to convince longtime players that the show respects the world, while also making it legible for viewers who have never touched the games. The upside, when it works, is scale. You can attract newcomers without asking them to memorize lore first.
The Last of Us, in contrast, built its reputation as a serious adaptation by translating an intensely character-driven game into a weekly TV format. The hard data points we have here don’t quantify fidelity directly. However, its HBO viewing trajectory and awards footprint show that the approach resonated widely. That success is part of why The Last of Us gets treated as the “standard” in adaptation debates, even when the latest Fallout season is the one actively airing.
Sequels and second waves: why the debate is resurfacing in early 2026
January 2026 is a useful moment to revisit this argument because Fallout is in the middle of a fresh run.
Prime Video shifted the release model for Fallout Season 2. Instead of dropping the season all at once, the rollout started with an early premiere. Episode 1 streamed Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2025, at a published time of 9 p.m. ET / 6 p.m. PT in at least one schedule. After that, episodes followed weekly on Wednesdays, with the finale set for Feb. 4, 2026. Newsweek published a full eight-episode schedule that also ends on Feb. 4.
That change in strategy affects how “success” shows up in metrics, and some coverage has addressed that directly. One report cited Nielsen data suggesting Season 2 logged 794 million viewing minutes in its release week, compared to 2.9 billion minutes for Season 1’s binge-drop week. The same piece argues the difference is largely explained by the weekly model. In other words, you are no longer comparing like for like.
There are also newer Amazon claims about Season 2’s reach, though not all of them come with raw numbers. GamesRadar reported Amazon described Fallout Season 2 as the sixth most-watched season of all time on Prime Video, and that 53% of viewers were outside the U.S. The report also notes Amazon did not publish full viewership data alongside that claim.
Meanwhile, The Last of Us Season 2 has already had its run. We have some reported snapshots of that, too, even if not all of it is sourced to primary documents in the material at hand. Wikipedia’s Season 2 page states the premiere night reached 5.3 million U.S. viewers (linear plus Max). It also lists streaming-minutes figures, including 805 million minutes for April 14 — 20 and 937 million minutes for April 21 — 27, with weekly top-10 rank placements.
Even treated cautiously, those figures show why the conversation moved beyond a single awards show. Both franchises kept producing measurable audience attention after their biggest “moment.” They just did it in different release patterns, and with different measurement systems used to describe them.
So which was 2024’s “best” adaptation? It depends on the yardstick you choose
When someone says “best adaptation,” they usually mean one of three things: audience impact, awards validation, or how well the show translates the source material’s appeal. The frustrating truth is that those don’t always align.
If you use The Game Awards 2024 as the yardstick, the answer is straightforward. Fallout won Best Adaptation in that year’s ceremony, and it beat a specific nominee slate that did not include The Last of Us Season 2.
If you use measurable 2024 audience impact, Fallout again has the cleanest set of headline-ready data. The 2.9 billion Nielsen minutes in its debut window, the record framing around Prime Video, and the three-week No. 1 streak create a strong argument that 2024 was Fallout’s year.
If you use HBO’s style of long-run prestige success, The Last of Us still looks like the heavyweight. AP’s report of its 4.7 million premiere, 8.2 million finale, and 30.4 million average across the first six episodes supports the idea that the show grew into an event, week by week, and then held its place in the broader TV awards ecosystem.
And if you use what happened after 2024, the picture gets even more balanced. The Game Awards’ own site now lists The Last of Us: Season 2 as a Best Adaptation winner in its later period. At the same time, Fallout is still actively building its TV footprint with a Season 2 finale coming Feb. 4, 2026, in a weekly format that invites sustained discussion.
There isn’t a single statistic that settles “best” for everyone. But there are enough real numbers, dates, and official results to say something concrete: Fallout owned the 2024 awards win and delivered enormous early streaming consumption, while The Last of Us remained the benchmark for HBO-scale audience growth and awards conversation, and later received its own Game Awards recognition for Season 2.
Opening-day details for the next big datapoint: Fallout’s Season 2 finale on Feb. 4, 2026
If you’re looking for the next moment that could shift the conversation again, it’s already on the calendar. Fallout Season 2 ends Feb. 4, 2026, after launching its first episode early on Dec. 16, 2025, and then moving into a weekly schedule.
That finale won’t retroactively change who won Best Adaptation at The Game Awards 2024. It could, however, change how people remember why Fallout won in the first place: not just as a great first season, but as a franchise that held viewers over multiple years, even with a different release model.
Either way, by early 2026, game adaptations are no longer fighting for legitimacy. They’re competing on the same terms as every other prestige and pop blockbuster series: numbers, awards, and whether the story keeps people watching.
