In an interview with CVG, Bethesda's VP of PR and Marketing, Pete Hines, discussed what surprises Bethesda has in store for the gaming community and how much the publisher appreciates good single-player games, despite facing an industry trend where most publishers fear the absence of multiplayer.
When asked about Bethesda's unique publishing choice to release not one, but two single-player experiences - one even being a true to form survival horror game, Pete Hines points to the publisher's past an influence on what kind of games it wants to support.
“We were a developer first and a publisher second.” Hines said. “if you go way back to the early days. We became a publisher to publish the games that we developed. Our approach has always been a dev-led one, and we've never aspired to be the kind of company that publishes twenty or thirty games in a year, and we don't sit around and have conversations about what's our Q3 shooter for 2015. We have a different approach, which is finding development studios that share a common philosophy or ideals regardless of genre.
I think we were set up to be a different kind of publisher and as a result we just approach things differently to everyone else. It doesn't mean we're right or wrong - we certainly haven't gotten everything right during the 14 years I've been at Bethesda - but we're trying, and we continue to learn and evolve as we go.”
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Bethesda is releasing Wolfenstein: The New Order and The Evil Within, both single-player games, later this year. Pete Hines and Bethesda recognize the risk in being a publisher that doesn't see multiplayer games as a necessity to meet profit projections and you have to truly admire that. I personally think that if there's one AAA publisher out there than can revive the survival horror genre (in a AAA sense), it's Bethesda. Skyrim, a single-player fantasy RPG, was a big sales success for the publisher. As o June 2013, Skyim has sold 20 million copies. As a fan of horror, I hope the risk behind releasing The Evil Within is rewarded; the genre could sure use a revival.
But if Hines' promising comments on single-player were not enough to make you warm and fuzzy inside, he reveals to CVG that the publisher has several projects in development across multiple studios. Hines informs us that the recently opened Austin, Texas studio Battlecry is working on an unannounced free-to-play game. Arkane and id Software are working on titles, as well. Hines then ends by stating that some Bethesda studios with already announced projects have lots of stuff going on behind the scenes.
Arkane has previously been rumored to have taken over Prey 2 development, and id Software is known to be working on DOOM 4.
