Hear me out, Bethesda hasn’t made a really successful game since Skyrim. their new overlords are more than happy to shuffle them around, and who’s to say Todd Howard won’t retire after TES6 is launched?
I’m seeing a lot of parallels to Bioware, with game after game not doing as hot as the previous ones, and XBOX being very trigger happy with axing studios that aren’t pulling their weight, similar to EA.
It’s possible TES6, if it releases, will be the make it or break it of the company.
No, Bioware was sold off by the founders to a private equity firm who eventually sold them off to EA, a company who even then was notorious for shutting game studios down arbitrarily. A sports game company that killed game companies for less, they were always an odd fit and the fact EA kept them for as long as they did was an anomaly.
Bethesda ownership wise and structurally speaking has remained the same from it’s peak till today. They have plenty of more flops to give and probably won’t care or learn from their mistakes like Bioware because of how unique Bioware’s situation was.
Microsoft is also pretty notorious for shutting down development studios they’ve bought up and let sit around without doing anything with them.
No, no, your a 100% right. But Bethesda isn’t a small studio making RPG’s for a large sports publisher/developer. They don’t just maoe bug filled messes, they also publish them, and wven their own flops often still make more than enough money that they don’t have to worry. Much as I hated Starfield, it still made a lot of money for being a hollow Skyrim clone in space.
they are owned by XBOX tho, sure internally it’s the same but externally it needs to make them money, and even Arkane wasn’t safe from getting axed in spite of the good games.
Arkane was a tragedy, a company that made it’s name from immersive sims forced to make a multiplayer, live-serivce game was destined to fail from inception.
I’d like to make this clear, I don’t like Bethesda for a lot of reasons I won’t get into right now, if there is one thing they’re still somehow good at is making money. Microsoft has never cared about review scores so long as their quarterly earnings were met/blown away.
Bethesda does a lot more than make one or 2 games a decade, they’re a successful publisher and recently a questionable developer (personally hated Starfield and Fallout 76). They have more in common with EA than they do Bioware in a business sense.