Bethesda "Not Interested" in Large Scale Publishing

[StewShearerOld]

Bethesda "Not Interested" in Large Scale Publishing

According to marketing VP Pete Hines, Bethesda intends to keep its focus on just a few good games at a time.

Some publishers like to be big, casting a net so wide that it's hard to keep track
of their many and various game releases. Others, however, opt to play a different game, investing in fewer titles but putting out products that arguably possess a longer lasting appeal. Bethesda, the company behind acclaimed titles like Fallout 3, Skyrim and Dishonored, would consider itself a member of that second group.

Speaking recently at QuakeCon, Pete Hines, the vice president of PR and marketing for Bethesda, affirmed the company's dedication to quality over quantity. "We don't want to be a publisher that is publishing 20 to 30 games a year, that's not who we are," he said. "We're more about fewer premium titles and putting our full attention behind those." According to Hines the end goal of this strategy is to put out the best games the company can manage. "If it's one a year, or two a year, or three a year or four a year, what's most important is backing the best bets, putting our full support behind those and making them great."

Granted, there are some financial advantages to having your company's fingers in a lot of pies. That said, The benefits of Bethesda's strategy aren't hard to pin down. Skyrim, for instance, spent several years in development and emerged to be definitive games of the current generation. Sometimes, it just comes down to the respect of your audience being worth more than short term dollars.

Source: Joystiq


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[Shadow-Phoenix]

Except even when you do focus on just the one or two games they still end up bugged to hell.

 

[cidbahamut]

Except even when you do focus on just the one or two games they still end up bugged to hell.

Doesn't matter when they fly off shelves, are loved anyway and you embrace the modding community so they patch half the bugs for you.

I fully support Bethesda's approach. It's like my grandfather used to say, "If something is worth doing, it's worth doing right".

 

[Roxas1359]

Except even when you do focus on just the one or two games they still end up bugged to hell.

At this point I expect Bethesda games to be buggier than a hooker with the flu to be honest. Bethesda have never had a good QA team for their games, but it should also be remembered that their sandbox games are so huge that they're bound to be bugs. For the other Fallouts a lot of the bugs could be attributed to the Gamebryo engine they used actually, and while Skyrim is still buggy it's at least less buggy than Oblivion, Fallout 3, and New Vegas by a bit.

 

[thetoddo]

Well that's good to hear. The games they produce are great, once all the bugs get killed after launch. I'm a big fan of Bethesda's work, but at this point I don't consider their games a Day One purchase. I get them all right after the second big patch is deployed.

Hopefully they'll expand on this philosophy and move more towards the Blizzard model of "it's done when it's done and when it's released it's going to work as advertised." I don't like everything Blizz puts out, but they have yet to release a completely (or even mostly) broken product.

 

[ArcossG]

It seems Bethesda and CDPR are well on their way to replace (the sell outs)Bioware and Blizzard as the Golden boys of gaming

 

[Shadow-Phoenix]

Except even when you do focus on just the one or two games they still end up bugged to hell.

Doesn't matter when they fly off shelves, are loved anyway and you embrace the modding community so they patch half the bugs for you.

I fully support Bethesda's approach. It's like my grandfather used to say, "If something is worth doing, it's worth doing right".

What of the people who buy the console versions?, mods surely don't save them and it still becomes beth's fault in the end.

Also expecting modders to fix the game just makes the game itself being made pointless from the devs side since they should be working to fix the game not us.

 

[cidbahamut]

Except even when you do focus on just the one or two games they still end up bugged to hell.

Doesn't matter when they fly off shelves, are loved anyway and you embrace the modding community so they patch half the bugs for you.

I fully support Bethesda's approach. It's like my grandfather used to say, "If something is worth doing, it's worth doing right".

What of the people who buy the console versions?

Don't make such poor decisions?

 

[Dragonbums]

Except even when you do focus on just the one or two games they still end up bugged to hell.

Doesn't matter when they fly off shelves, are loved anyway and you embrace the modding community so they patch half the bugs for you.

I'm sorry, but it is an embarrassment to the quality of the game when you as a developer have to rely on YOUR FANS to fix the game you made.
That should never be someone's job outside of Bethesda to take on, and that should never be used as a persuasion to get someone to overlook the bugginess of a game.

 

[Batman]

So I guess that's why they bullied Arkane and Human Head until one studio gave up and sold itself while the other one quit it's ip all together? They didn't want too many ips cluttering up their precious calendar? I don't have anything against the Bethesda dev team, but it's not the dev team that's the topic of this article is it? Has everybody forgotten the extremely underhanded way they tried to trap Human Head into selling themselves for a piddly amount? and how they ended up buying Arkane outright? But I guess the consumer don't care about what happen to small backwater dev teams, as long as there's enough bug ridden titles being shoved out like so many premature foetuses.

 

[cidbahamut]

You people are putting words in my mouth. I'm not saying that they rely on fans patching the game for them. I'm saying that respecting your audience and embracing the modding community rather than ignoring it or actively discouraging it has beneficial side effects.

If you can't see how that's a good thing then you're being willfully ignorant.

 

[Shadow-Phoenix]

Except even when you do focus on just the one or two games they still end up bugged to hell.

Doesn't matter when they fly off shelves, are loved anyway and you embrace the modding community so they patch half the bugs for you.

I fully support Bethesda's approach. It's like my grandfather used to say, "If something is worth doing, it's worth doing right".

What of the people who buy the console versions?

Don't make such poor decisions?

No poor decisions don't come into this, not when consoles have a valid reason to exist and putting a not so shitty game onto them is meant to be the norm and priority.

"Don't make poor decisions" is nowhere near an excuse for beth to carry on making more buggier games compared to the millions out there that have done better.

 

[jdogtwodolla]

Didn't they Publish Brink and Hunted: the Demon's Forge?

Now didn't they also Publish Wet and Rogue Warrior?

 

[Krantos]

*Reads Article*

Good on ye, Beth! Love your work!

Let see what other people have to say...

*Reads comments*

For the record, Bethesda Game Studios obviously has a good QA team. The games would be unplayable otherwise. Anyone expecting games like TES and Fallout to be bug free clearly aren't developers themselves (games or otherwise). As you add more and more elements to a program, the potential for bugs doesn't increase linearly, but exponentially. With games as big, as open, and as freeform as BGS games simply cannot be bug free. Like, ever. It would easily take more time than it took to make the game to iron all the bugs out.

If you've ever done bug fixing yourself you'd know that finding the bug is only the first, and frankly easiest step. Then you have to isolate what's causing it. This can be a multi-hour, even multi-DAY job, in and of itself, and sometimes, if the bug isn't critical, you end up just having to say, "Can't find it."

Then, if you do find what's causing the bug, you have to figure out how to fix it. And this isn't always easy either. For simple bugs, like those caused by mistyping, or simply forgetting to change a variable somewhere, this is easy. Other times, you'll need to rework entire chunks of code simply to get at the problem. If it's really bad, or the element that needs to be fixed is used multiple other places, fixing it could require days of digging through code you didn't write to find all the places the problem touches and making sure the "fix" isn't going to break anything else.

In the worst case scenario, fixing, what to the end user seems like a simple bug, could require writing the entire structure of part of the program. In those cases, if the bug isn't critical, you just have to say "Can't fix."

When you consider having to do this for a program as massive as a TES game, it becomes absolutely daunting.

As a Software Developer myself (though not in the games industry), I have nothing but respect for Bethesda's QA team. To work as hard as they must to make the game as stable as it is, then be routinely bludgeoned on the internet because gamers expect a game that big to be bug free? That can't be easy to deal with. And yet, you never hear them bite back. Unlike so many other studios that feel they need to defend themselves and just come off looking worse in the long run, BGS takes the criticism in stride. Sure those multi-million sales numbers probably help soften the blow, but still.

My hat's off to those guys.

 

[JamesBr]

Except even when you do focus on just the one or two games they still end up bugged to hell.

At this point I expect Bethesda games to be buggier than a hooker with the flu to be honest. Bethesda have never had a good QA team for their games, but it should also be remembered that their sandbox games are so huge that they're bound to be bugs. For the other Fallouts a lot of the bugs could be attributed to the Gamebryo engine they used actually, and while Skyrim is still buggy it's at least less buggy than Oblivion, Fallout 3, and New Vegas by a bit.

A small point here, I somehow doubt the problem is with their QA team. QA finds MANY bugs that never get fixed due to lack of time and money. Given that Bethesda games have obvious game-breaking bugs at launch, you cannot say that QA didn't find the issues. Give QA a bit of credit. They are not the developers, they just find the issues, not fix them.

OT: Agreed, I'll take an expansive and deep, yet flawed game that takes years to make above churned out pap any day, if the 600+ hours I spent in Skyrim, 200+ in Fallout 3, 200+ in Oblivion has anything to say about it ^^

 

[DataSnake]

So I guess that's why they bullied Arkane and Human Head until one studio gave up and sold itself while the other one quit it's ip all together? They didn't want too many ips cluttering up their precious calendar? I don't have anything against the Bethesda dev team, but it's not the dev team that's the topic of this article is it? Has everybody forgotten the extremely underhanded way they tried to trap Human Head into selling themselves for a piddly amount?

I hadn't heard about that. Do you have a link?

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

Yes, because the licensed Star Trek games they've put out have had /so/ much care put into them. No seriously, I love the stuff they make in house, but I can't fathom them saying this when they're currently the sole publisher of Star Trek shovelware. They're responsible for Star Trek: Encounters for god's sake. I've got three of their Star Trek games on their shelf. Of the three, one is terrible regardless of how much you love the series (Encounters) one is pretty bad but worth playing if you like the franchise (Shattered Universe) and the last is half way decent, but again, only if you like the franchise (Star Trek: Tactical Assault)

And then halfway through writing this post, I realized that Shattered Universe was made before they got the rights to the franchise, which means of the Star Trek games I've played that they published, there's one terrible one and one that's just North of mediocre.

Edit: Also, on further research it looks like they only had the rights long enough to put out four games, apparently none of which were particularly good. Funnily enough if you check their website, those games aren't even on the list, although they gleefully claim most of what iD made before Bethesda bought them out.

 

[Shadow-Phoenix]

Except even when you do focus on just the one or two games they still end up bugged to hell.

Doesn't matter when they fly off shelves, are loved anyway and you embrace the modding community so they patch half the bugs for you.

I fully support Bethesda's approach. It's like my grandfather used to say, "If something is worth doing, it's worth doing right".

What of the people who buy the console versions?

Don't make such poor decisions?

No poor decisions don't come into this, not when consoles have a valid reason to exist and putting a not so shitty game onto them is meant to be the norm and priority.

"Don't make poor decisions" is nowhere near an excuse for beth to carry on making more buggier games compared to the millions out there that have done better.

Should Bethesda do everything they can to squash bugs before release? Of course.

Are you an idiot for buying a Bethesda game on a console instead of the PC? Absolutely.

These two things are not mutually exclusive. Bethesda should step up its game, but you as a consumer should also be making better decisions.

So basically you're calling out every console user for having bought any bethesda game ever as a complete pleb?, I'm sure that'l make sense to those not using or owning a console but being an apparent twit for buying something that should work is still the fault of the creator not the customer.

I'm sorry mate but I just can't see how blaming customers for buying something that should work making any sense even at all.

It would be like me calling you an absolute fucktard for buying a burnt and charred bacon sandwich when it really wasn't your fault at all, it was the one who cooked it that was at fault entirely.

 

[Ympulse]

Except even when you do focus on just the one or two games they still end up bugged to hell.

You have no idea what goes into the nuts and bolts of a game as huge as Skyrim or Oblivion.

"AMG BUGS" - Well no shit, they'd need years of QA being done on the 'final' product to cut out all of those bugs you speak of.

 

[JediMB]

I salute you, Bethesda.

As long as you keep making an effort to do better (that is, enhance your strengths on work on your weaknesses), you can just keep doing what you're doing.