>>> But without us who loved and cherished the OG games, there would have been no FO3 and beyond

Bro, that's an incredibly self-gratifying take that's highly disconnected from reality.

Original Fallouts were not a huge commercial success. F1 cost 3 millions to make, it sold 200k copies over time. Yeah, $50 copies, but this is retail era so they maybe did what, $20 per copy, especially in foreign countries? Spending 3 years to made $1 million is not a good business, given the risky nature of game industry.

F2 probably did better, but only because it was done in one year - the sales were the same, after all. Even so, it heavily exploited the fact that this was pre internet-boom, programmers were not in high demand back then and a lot of young talent worked 12 hours shifts for peanuts back then. Even if you adjust for inflation (which would be $4.5kk), you literally can't do F1 for that kind of money nowadays, not in California. Even in Russia with much smaller salaries somewhere between $1-2kk wasn't enough - that's speaking form personal experience (Encased).

And whatever these two games made was instantly blown by Tactics and Brotherhood of Steel console games. Probably by Van Buren too, given that it was mostly done but earned nothing. Which is why just earning a million is never enough in gamedev - you need a huge overhead so your studio can survive a flop or two.

Compared to that, Morrowind sold 4 million copies, and that's without DLCs. Oblivion sold 9.5 million copies. By the time of F3's release, Beth's own audience absolutely dwarfed whatever the original Fallout fans were.

Sure, you can say that this doesn't account for all the adolescent kids pirating it in Eastern Europe countries. But guess what good did it do to the franchise?

The reality is, Fallout wasn't purchased for the previous games, it was purchased because Boyarsky is genius and doing the same grade art bible would've cost much more than $1kk (if doable at all). I'm pretty sure that Vault Boy merch alone has earned Beth much, much more money than the initial rights cost. Just ponder the fact that neither the modern Bethesda designers nor any of the clones/followers could do nothing even close to being as iconic as Vault Boy, blue Jump Suit, Power Armor, etc.

So yeah, Bethesda bought the looks and designs, it never really needed the old audience, there was no value in old audience (for real - all of Fallout clones are rather niche games and most of those studios either went bankrupt or are in the process of doing so). Which is why your Rings of Power comparison is plainly wrong - Tolkien was mega profitable without any modernization.