Bethesda nearly outspent Activision last month with $14M in Fallout 4 TV ads

Bethesda made a rare appearance alongside Activision, Ubisoft and Electronic Arts in the big-spender charts for video game TV ads last month, reportedly dropping more than $14 million on four separate Fallout 4 ads that ran nearly 800 times across 21 networks.

Those figures come courtesy of a monthly report from ad analytics firm iSpot.tv syndicated on GamesBeat, and they're notable for suggesting that big-budget publishers have returned with the holiday season to dominate TV ad spend after being eclipsed by mobile game companies earlier this year.

Back in April iSpot.tv chief Sean Muller claimed that together King, Supercell, Machine Zone and uCool accounted for 30 percent of all money spent on video game TV ads in the first half of 2015, mostly centered around the Super Bowl American football event. 

Skip forward to November, and mobile game makers are nowhere to be seen in iSpot.tv's accounting of the month's top 5 spenders; instead, it's Activision (Call of Duty: Black Ops 3) leading at $18.6 million, followed by Bethesda (Fallout 4), Electronic Arts (Star Wars: Battlefront), Ubisoft (Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Siege) and Nintendo (Pokemon Super Mystery Dungeon)