At gamescom 2015, Pete Hines, Vice President of PR and Marketing at Bethesda, sat down for interviews with both MCV UK and Metro, where he discussed the future of the company.
In the years after Bethesda released Brink, Hunted, Rage, and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim in 2011, Dishonored and Doom 3: BFG Edition were the only highlights, before they returned strong in 2014 with The Elder Scrolls Online, Wolfenstein: The New Order, and The Evil Within.
Now in a place where all of their studios have released a game and are “starting to hit a bit more consistency,” Hines told MCV that Bethesda wants to get to a point where they have a few big games every year:
I don’t think it’s necessarily the case that we are doing okay with seven studios, but if it was 14 we could do twice as much. We are pretty aware of who we are and we ultimately want to build to a point where we are doing three or four big titles a year. I would prefer not to be in the same place we were in in 2011, where we had four titles and then went super quiet. I want to avoid that. We want to get to the point of regular releases, but we are not thinking: ‘What if we did eight or 10 games a year?’ That’s just not who we are or how we do things.
Next year will have games like Dishonored 2 and Doom, so they’re off to a good start.
Also touching upon their release plans in the Metro interview, Hines notes that they aren’t looking to just release a ton of games each year:
We don’t believe in taking a franchise and doing an annual version of it. We’re not looking to publish to some sort of volume, to say, ‘Here’s your 15 titles for 2015!’.
We’re just set-up to do fewer, bigger things. To try and make sure that our games are innovating, whether it’s in open world or survival horror or whatever it is… that we’re doing stuff that other folks wouldn’t do or don’t do. And so far it’s worked pretty well for us.
Clearing up a few licensing questions as wel, Hines confirmed they no longer have the licenses for Terminator or Star Trek and haven’t been able to sell their older games as a result.
Arriving on November 10, Fallout 4 is going to be huge, and Hines believes it could top Skyrim as their biggest game of all time:
I think this can top Skyrim. It could be our biggest release ever. But we will see. It is part of my job to build the megaphone that we hold up to the game, and the game decides how loud it goes. Just how big it is going to be is hard to say. Skyrim was a massively big deal.
If you’re thinking Fallout Shelter on mobile might be even more lucrative than Fallout 4 though, Hines says, “No way” and that it won’t even be close.
