Kinda Funny Gamescast: Video Game Podcast - Bethesda's VP Of Marketing Pete Hines (Special Guest) - Kinda Funny Gamescast Ep. 106

Episode Date: February 10, 2017

Bethesda's VP of Marketing and PR Pete Hines joins us for a very special one-on-one with Greg Miller. (Released on Patreon 02.03.17) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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What's up, everybody? Welcome to the Kind of Funny Gamescast. Episode 106. It's funny because usually Tim would be here and Colin would be here and we would say the first time ever, the first one, and it's not this time, but I'll explain that in a second. Over here is my very special guest, Pete Hines from Bethesda. Hey, how are you? Yay for me. No, don't clap for yourself.

That's a bad look. It's a bad look. Don't want. If kids don't know, Pete Hines from Bethesda, you are VP of Marketing and PR over there. Yeah. You've been there? How long? A little over 17 years.

17 and change. Gotcha. You've made a lot of history there. I have. Been there a long time for a lot of stuff. You've made kind of funny history as well. Yeah. You are a part of the biggest kind of funny disaster we've ever had.

It's an honor. So what happened is yesterday you came in and did. And just fucking killed it. You did. No, we did a games cast for like an hour and 45 minutes. And it was awesome. And it was me. And it was Tim and it was Colin.

And it was you. And it was three topics that were all about you and Bethesda. And then the end of it was Reader. mail where they asked you questions as well. And it was awesome and thought provoking and great. And we got all these interesting things. And then we stood up, said goodbye to you, sat back down, did two ads. And then we all sat down and me and Tim started talking about what we need to do next. And we scare Kevin. Fuck. And we're like, what? And he came in. He's like, there's like, there's like, there's like, oh, we can do those again. He's like, I need to check the games cast. And I was like,

oh, no. He's like, you check PS I love you. And a hush fell over the room. And it was one of those things and I like and I you know I saw Kevin do it and I was like and I you know edit PSI love you and other shows for us and so I checked up the PSI Love You footage which was recorded literally minutes before you got here it was fine and then yeah he looked at the games cast and nothing there and there's one pop and it's like it's one of those to be very clear you know we usually whenever something goes wrong we give Kevin shit or whatever this was not Kevin's fault one of our drives just completely died for no reason nobody knows why and you being such a stand up guy decided to come back today to talk to me.

Here I am. And so I thought, we thought rather than do the same thing, thank you very much, and be awkward and make you do the exact same beats and everything else, we'll just do a one-on-one, which works out in my favor. Because I feel like I, first off, miss interviews, like, well, I used to do up at noon, even though this is going to be way longer than up at noon. But I also like you a lot. We've struck up the bromance on the evening.

Yeah. Yeah. How does that feel? Plus yesterday, I accidentally announced the next three BGS titles, and that would have been really bad for me to, like, completely unscrued. to have announced everything Todd Howard is working on for the next. Exactly. Far in New Orleans.

It was rough. You know, we didn't know how to do. We didn't know. Okay. Not funny. Not funny. No.

Yeah, but honestly, it's fine. I totally understand. And yeah, I was too excited to have a chance to finally be on after, I mean, you and I had talked and I was like,

God, I'm never in San Fran and here I am. And yeah, I finished all this stuff today. This is great. Yeah. Well, yeah. So,

I mean, what are you in town for right now? You're because obviously Bethesda out in Maryland. where you guys usually are. Right. Well, we announced the Elder Scrolls Online Morwin today, which is the next big chapter for the Elder Scrolls Online. And me having worked on Morwin, you know, 15 odd years ago,

came out to not only talk about this, but also give some context for like, you know, what was Morwin? Why did it matter? Why is it a cool? Why is this a cool thing to want to play? So I've been doing a lot of stuff for that and talking about some Elder Scrolls Legends stuff.

And, you know, the deal. I just sort of shoot the shit about whatever. Yeah. Yeah. So how do you keep doing it? Why do you keep doing it? Like you're talking about, you know, more than 15 years of doing this for Bethesda. You know, I mean, you've been in one spot doing all this stuff.

Uh-huh. What keeps you coming back? Because I mean, like, I don't know how much our audience knows, but like what you're describing, of course, sounds fun. Oh, you come out to San Francisco, you meet some people, you talk about this game. But year after year, you know, every five, you have a family. You're, you're leaving everyone you know to come out here and talk to strangers, people, acquaintances, you know what I mean, do fun things.

But you're working. is that thing of time differences and flights and this and the other complications. What makes you stay at Bethesda? What makes you stay in this industry? What makes you keep wanting to work on these games? I don't spend a whole lot of time ever thinking about that. It's a good question, but like it's not something. It's just like this is what I want to do.

I feel like this is what I was meant to do. I was meant to be at a company like Bethesda. I always growing up. I was a little kid. I was a smallest kid in my class all the way through grades. school, you know, first kid in line for the class pictures when they went size, shortest, the tallest. And even through high school, you know, I didn't really hit a grossbert until I hit college. So I was, you know, I went to a small Catholic high school in North Carolina. I went to a

small university, Wake Forest. And I was just kind of used to like, I don't know, smaller, more close-knit environments. And, you know, when I started at Bethesda, 17 plus years ago, that's what Bethesda was. I mean, the team working on more one at a time. was in one hallway. It was probably 12 people that I sat with. The company total was, you know, maybe 25 or plus in Bethesda. We're probably over 1,500. Jeez, Louise. And, you know, offices all over the world and all of that. But it's, you know, a chance to work in industry that, you know, that means something to me. I've been a gamer all my life from the early days of playing the, you know, the Atari 2,600 and having a VIC-20.

and typing programs in from Run Magazine. There used to be this magazine called Run Magazine, and people would sort of put in code for little programs that you could type in and run, and my brother and I would type in tiny little games that we could play on my crappy little VIC-20. But, you know, it was just something I loved and used to lose myself in.

And so to be able to work in the industry you care about, to be able to work at a company that, you know, isn't thought of as a big, giant mega corporation. You know, the people that I work with, that I have the privilege to work with and alongside every day are my friends. They are essentially my second family. It's all I've ever known in this industry. And the games that we make are stuff that I genuinely love to be a part of and love to

help make a success. And, you know, those opportunities don't come along an awful lot in life. And so the chance to keep doing that and every time trying to do it better is, you know, it's still fun and exciting for me. And I think if ever a day comes that it's not, then maybe I'll go do something else. But for now, they haven't gotten rid of me. And that's the most impressive thing. Yeah.

And I, this is, the question I led off with yesterday was what happened to Bethesda. And it's still, I still, especially all the context you just gave is still my question. What happened with Bethesda and the fact that you go from being this small group to being this huge group? You still have your tight-knit. These are my friends. these are my family feel to it. But I keep going back to when I think about Bethesda, because you know, you're this interesting beast in terms of a publisher slash developer in the way that, you know, I'm celebrating a decade in the industry this year. This is in my, my,

my decades. Thank you very much. Actually, today is my decade of Jeremy Dunham sending my, the email saying, hey, do you want to, you're still interested in this job. I'd like to interview you. That's awesome. Thank you very much. And when I got there, you know, 2007, I get there, right as Fallout 3 starts to become this giant thing. Because it's like we get there and there's still elder scrolls. Right. And stick with you. I'm playing fast and loose.

But I mean like my second E3 is the Fallout 3 E3 where we talked about yesterday where Carl Moriarty walks in you guys think he's punking a year. You're like, you know what I mean? Because you're about to play a demo where you meet Kyle Moriarty and Fallout 3. Yeah. And so even then I remember me like, oh, cool. Fallout, I've kind of heard about it. It's not my, you know, I wasn't a PC guy.

I don't know anything about that really. But then Fallout 3 obviously becomes this thing. and even Elder Scrolls, I had known about it, but high fantasy was never my thing. Even then you guys were, I don't want to say, like, you were, you were clearly players in the video game space. You were, but I mean, like, now, you're Bethesda. Now you are this thing where you, like, I was talking about, you know, your 2015 press conference at E3, where I really felt that was not, that was a statement from you guys of like,

hey, everybody, we've, whatever you thought of us before, we've quietly been aligning studios, partnerships, games, franchises, and now we're ready to, come out and say, we are a Ubisoft, we are in EA, we are one of these people you need to think about as a brand rather than a collection of random titles. Where does that come from? Where does that start? Well, first of all, it's funny when you talk about like 2007 and coming off of oblivion and going into fall three and I'm sitting here trying to think and I can't answer it and take me a while to because you're like, well, Bethesda wasn't necessarily somebody that was on your radar.

And I'm trying to think, like, well, outside of oblivion in Fall Out 3, like, why would you have heard of us? Like, what was the thing that we had shipped? I'm sure we shipped stuff in between there. Like, I'm positive. Sure. Nothing jumps to mind. Like, it's just not, it's not a kid. We were doing titles, like a sea dogs or echelon or, I mean, shit, I used to go to, we were doing IHRA drag racing games for a while.

And I was up in, I went to Indiana once and Michigan once to do some different drag race events. and, you know, because we were making a lot of money off of making drag racing games. Go really fast straight for a quarter of a mile. We can render really well for this quarter of a mile. And how you get there is by, first of all, recognizing sort of who you are and what you're about, which is we're Bethesda. We're not ever going to try and build to do 10, 20, 50 games a year. we don't make um we're not focused on the casual market we're not focused on any number of other

things that have kind of come and gone and and uh and come into vogue or so forth we focus on a few small things we make the kind of stuff that we like to play that is unique or has a different take or an interesting approach to something whether it's a shooter or an RPG or whatever um and that's what we're going to do and focus on and how you get to where we were in 15 is by starting in 2008, 2007, and even before then, by continuing to look for people that had similar philosophies and goals in terms of like, I want to make something, but I don't want it to just be formulaic or to do something that somebody else has done. And you start to, you know, follow and talk with people like Rothko Antonio at Arcane. You start having conversations with the id guys or,

you know, keeping in touch with the guys that became machine games. that had done really cool stuff at other publishers, at other developers, and finding people who shared that common belief in terms of what am I trying to do with this game? I want to do something special. I have a special take doing something different and building that capacity. You know, it was never our intention to say, we need to buy X number of studios in the next few years. It was, let's just find cool people to work with in the case of Arcane.

We finally sort of got on their radar where they didn't have a project they were moving on to, next and we started working with them on what became the original dishonored, but we worked with them for a while before we ever had the conversation about, hey, like, maybe it makes sense for you to be internal. Like, is that something you guys would be interested? Yeah, sure. And it just worked out that way. Same thing with, with Id. Like, that conversation started like, we love what you guys do and, you know, we'd like to talk to you about, you know, can we work together? There's a possibility of something we could do. And that conversation evolved in a similar way. So internally, as you're, this is happening is, I feel like, and maybe it's just the jaded guy inside of me in the video game

industry and how corporations work and all this jazz. Is there a company meeting where you're talking about our goals are to become this thing and do this thing or is it so natural that one day you're in a meeting and you look back and like, well, we are working with it and we have arcane and we have, ooh, like, is it just we want to get a menagerie of awesome people together or was it you wanted to hit these different beats and go out and move this way? It was honestly more about like, what do we want to be working on? next and who do we want to be working on it with and trying to constantly reevaluate and examine like what are our options, what are our possibilities? Because you talk to a lot of people

all the time, but sometimes you find the right studio you want to work with and a cool idea or a notion of what you might want to do. But look, a lot of these folks are indie developers and the way that they work or are structured, like they don't just have the flexibility to say like we finish that thing, we're going to take a little while to kind of think about what we want to do next. Like they got bills to pay. And, you know, some of them are literally living hand to mouth, even the really successful ones because that's just how indie development worked. And so you're trying to find the right opportunities in the right times to bring people on board to do things that you think are cool or interesting or different and figure out like, okay, well, how long

is that going to take? Because what you don't want is, all right, well, we accidentally released six titles in 2010 and then we got nothing in 11 and nothing in 12 because everybody was lined up for one year. Like that's not good either. So it's about timing and figuring out how to pace it out and find the right fits. And we did hit a strike there. We went in it and then I don't remember what the order of the dominoes was, but arcane machine games and tango kind of came in close succession. But all of those were sort of individual unique situations based on conversations and what was going on. And it wasn't like somebody went to Todd Vaughn, our VP of Development. It was like, look, go find us three studios to buy, you know, this year, go.

Yeah. It was just who we're going to work with. He's like, well, Shinji is, you know, looking to do survival horror. He's got this studio. We should talk to them. And these guys at Star Breeze all left. And there's a core of them that, you know, started machine games. And they were really interested in doing Wolf.

Like each of those things kind of on their own sounded like good opportunities and sort of got us to where we were in 2015 and where we are today. And I mean, well, that's the thing. You know, you know, I talked about it yesterday. but I think it was my own, not naivitate, but I mean, I was wrong in the way, when I remember watching the 2015 press conference, and we did it, it was awesome. We're like, oh, it fall looks great,

but they'd all saw their stuff. And it's like, this was awesome. They won't do it again next year because this is clearly what they were, they had this roster ready to go of these amazing games. And that's, and that's all well and good. They're not a player like that. Right.

And then next year you guys, no, here's your invitation to the 2016. You shove it. And like, oh, damn, all right. And then I think it really was that thing. You did that.

And then you put out in, I mean, 2016, a banner year for you guys. Yeah. I mean, Doom. And then, I mean, doom coming out and then being lauded is just like, oh, my God, what a revival. It feels so different. It's so beautiful. It's so smooth. And then Dishonor 2 coming out and being that game that wins game of the year.

And we talked about this yesterday and we'll get to it again, being this hardcore fan base around it where you either get it and you love it or you don't. Who cares? You know what I mean? Right. You guys are moving in a different clip now, I think. And it's interesting. I, knowing you and having followed you and.

having yesterday's conversation, now today's conversation, I guess it wasn't a change in philosophy. It's just the way it became. No, it really wasn't. It was just, you know, I've said before, people asked me like, what do you want the next year to look like for Bethesda? Or like, what do you want to be doing personally in five years? And my answer is always, I just want to do a better version of the thing that we already

did. Like, there's going to be a new game coming along and like, how do we take all the stuff that we learned from the last game that we made, whether it's how we talk about it, or when we talk about it or how we interact with the developer and go through the process. We talked about this yesterday about like the challenge of just working with somebody you've never shipped a game with and figuring out how to work together to make sure you're each kind of getting what you need out of the partnership and shipping something and then saying like, okay, we learned a lot.

Like, let's do that again only better. Like there's no, there's no end to that path. Nobody has got it perfect because every game has its own challenges. And so just that where we are now is just a continue progression. What do I want 2017 to look like? I want to execute even better on the stuff that we have to execute on. You know, we've got Prey, we got Elder Scrolls Online Morewin that we just announced. We got a few other things going on that we haven't announced.

We've got Quake Champions working. We got Elder Scrolls Legends, you know, going to be coming out of beta and coming out to a bunch of other platforms. Like, I just want to do each of those the justice they deserve from my team's standpoint of talking about them and getting the word out there and hopefully reaching an audience that says that's pretty cool. I like what that's doing. Like, I want to try it. I want to play it. Or you should try it and play it or whatever.

Did you know when you started in on all this that every game was going to be different like that? Like did you or was that a harsh reality to wake up to the fact of like, oh, well, you know, we did this game that way. So I can apply that. Oh, no, I can't. Okay, well, I learned, no, I can't do that in this one. For me, it was a pretty easy lesson to learn early on because so much of the stuff that I was working,

on was this like, I mean, I think we may have talked about this before, but like my first press tour was just this dog's breakfast of video games. Like, we had just shipped PBA bowling right before I started at Bethesda in 1999. Who can forget? We were working on IHRA drag racing, Skip Barber Racing. Skip Barber is a racing school like performance cars. My brother's actually been through the Skip Barber Racing School. Was he in the game? He was not, which never shipped. So nobody was technically in that game. We were working on sea dogs, which was like a naval-based RPG based out of Russia. We were working on echelon, which was like a fighter, futuristic fighter thing.

Like it was just all over the place. And there really wasn't anything like, oh, we could just kind of formulate. Like, what are you going to take from IHRA drag racing that applies at all to sea dogs? Like it was just this, we were kind of all over the place and the kinds of stuff we were trying and doing. So no, I kind of knew early on like, yeah, this is going to be like, starting all over from scratch every single time, every single game, just because ultimately, that's mostly what it felt like. You shift from a naval-based RPG to I-HRA drag racing too. Not a lot of milestones and ideas. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, we talked about all these games

you're putting out that I think are, you know, extraordinary. You know what I mean? Whether it be fallout, whether it be dishonored, whether it be Elder Scrolls and stuff like that, you have this reputation right now for putting out these amazing games. Everybody loves Bethesda. You guys fire on all cylinders. But I think that becomes you call the herd. You guys have been known to, you know, get away and pray to pray to, right? We're not going to do this game anymore.

We're going to get away. For you, when, how, at what point in development do you know, oh, my God, we're on to something crazy good like Doom? Or do you know, like, okay, something's really wrong and we have to start thinking about cutting pray two? And those are just examples. Sure. It's different for every game.

Obviously there's milestones all along the way that are kind of check-ins in terms of like, are we developing all the art assets we need and getting, you know, milestones checked off in terms of like where we need our AI to be or our graphics rendering or whatever. But there are larger checkpoints along the way where you expect to get your first hands-on or something that's a chunk that's a representative four to five hours of the game that's really kind of showing you. It may not all be pretty and beautiful, but it's a representative slice of like, this is what the game is going to be like. Those come in different points for different

games. And sometimes you reach a point and you actually haven't checked all the boxes, but you know really for certain, or just sometimes it's a feeling like, okay, we've got a few, issues, but these issues are really solvable and easy. Like, I remember for a long time, Wolfenstein, the new order was, in my opinion, and a number of folks in my group and throughout the company was way too hard. You just died all the time way too easy, which at a certain point in a, you could raise a flag and be like, this is going to be a real problem. But, you know, talking to, again, the Todd Vaughn, our VP of Development, he has a wonderful sense

for like, what are the solutions to the problem? And he's like, yeah, in this case, like, the actual problem you're feeling is we're not dropping enough ammo. That's why you keep dying, because you keep running out of ammo for all these different weapons and you end up, like, just shooting this one crappy one that you're not very good at and it doesn't do much. Like, we just need to drop more ammo. It'll be fine.

Yeah. Okay. Like, that's something you don't. Right. Another one of, like, playing a game in two hours and, like, this isn't fun. Yeah. Like, what do you mean? It's not fun.

Like, what do you mean? What do I mean? I'm not having any fun. I just spent two hours on something and at no point was it fun. I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't know what I was supposed to do next. Like that's a like, well, how do we solve that? Like that's a much tougher question to answer.

And so, you know, to your question, there, certainly with projects, you know, Doom 4, we, we called it at a certain point and said it looks beautiful. It runs great. It is actually fun. It's just not Doom. And we need, if this is going to succeed, we're going to reboot this. thing and kind of bring it back into, you know, this modern era, it's got to be an authentic Doom game and not something that's got the Doom name, but feels more like Battlefield or Call of Duty or whatever. And we made that call at a point where you could get a good idea of what

the game was and appreciate, like there's nothing we're going to do to this based on what we have that's going to get it there. We got to stop and throw all of this out and retool. And in the case of something else, you just reach a point where you hit those problems that, like, I don't don't see a path how we're going to get there. You might have a schedule that says, well, this is how we get to the end of the game. But like, checking off all of the things on the milestone list is not the goal of game development, right? The goal of game development is when we're done, we have something really fun and interesting and unique that people are going to want to play and enjoy. And when they do play it, they're like, wow, this is really cool. You should play it. You should try it. Des honor to Doom. Like those games hit that bar, reach that goal. Just finishing the game is not good. So, you know, enough and and our belief has always been you know kind of going back to our core philosophy that ultimately the game is the thing and and it's a really hard decision to cancel a game or to start over or to delay a product all of those things we take really seriously because you know we are running a company that

pays salaries to people and like the only way we do that is if we make money so delaying stuff has real consequences but you have to do what's in the best interest which is long term the thing that we make has to really resonate with the audience that it's intended for or like we're screwed. It doesn't matter how many ad dollars you spend. It doesn't matter how many people, you know, you get to stream the game. Like, it's just going to die before you ever get started. And so you, um, you don't always enjoy making those decisions. But ultimately, like, if we're going to succeed and we're going to continue to, to go forward, you've got to be able to step back and say, like, are we actually going to get to

where we intend to or has this all been for not. And sometimes, you know, you end up waving goodbye to millions and millions of dollars you spent over years to make a thing and just say, look, all we're looking at is millions more that we're going to put into something that we have no real path to success. I know you can only talk about what you know, what you've been through with Bethesda, but do you see that policy becoming more standard in the video game industry at large? Because I always, we always talk about it. And I'm, me in particular when I bring up this argument is the fact that when I first started, I mean, there was there was that middling, I'm a B tier, A tier, I'm a T HQ game, right?

But it's the same thing you just talked about that. You guys are cutting and running on games because it's not up to our standards. We don't want it, right? And that's why when people see Bethesna on the box, that means something. Whereas I can sit there and say, you're licensed mid-tier. I'm a weird racing game that doesn't need to exist. I'm Crush Hour. Is it a T-HQ game?

And T-HQ isn't around anymore. Right. And then earlier we had, you know, Shadow the Classes up, which makes you know, makes you think Last Guardian and you saw Sony of that age, the PS2 to PS3, like, take all the time you need. And then now with PlayStation 4, you see them cutting first party studios and saying, we don't want this and not, you know what I mean? Like, they feel, they seem more proactive as somebody who watches them on the industry. I think that's, I think that's fair to say. I mean, the truth of the answer is, is what you said, which is I don't, I don't really know. I'm sort of

at best, a casual observer. And I tend to pay a lot more attention. And, folks, focus a lot more on what we're doing and what my team is doing and what our devs are doing than I really focus on external forces because there's any number of cases in the past where what everybody else was doing was irrelevant because it was a terrible fit for us. Facebook gaming became a massive thing and everybody was grabbing studios and throwing games out because that was the big thing. Well, if I just looked at what everybody else was doing, like, well, we were gone running down that path too. Sure.

You know, it's not like it's up to me. But if you're there in your hat telling everybody what to do, Todd Howard's like, yes, sir, right? I'll get right to programming in no universe has that ever happened. But, you know, we, we didn't go running after that because we were focused on like, okay, that's nice, but that's not what we do. And that when everybody went crazy with like handheld, casual market games for DS and whatever else, like, we didn't go running after that either because that's just, yeah,

okay, I mean, maybe that works for them. That's not what we do. You know, we, the first really big entry that we had into the mobile space was Fallout Shelter. Which was quite the big entry. Was a big entry. But also, like, you could look at that and say, like, does that feel like a Bethesda game? And I think most folks would pretty quickly say, yeah. Like, it felt true to fallout. It was interesting. It did things differently as it related to in-app purchases or how much it did or didn't feel like it was trying to reach for your wallet. It was pretty, pretty casual with that. But It fit the tone and vibe of fall. It was fun and tactile and just kind of struck a chord.

Like that's the kind of stuff where we see those opportunities, those ideas come up. And Todd's like, I got this idea. I want to make a game like this. And everybody's like, yeah, like that seems awesome. I would totally play that. And, you know, those are the kinds of things that we want to back, things that the devs believe in and that feel like they come from our DNA of having something special to bring to the table that maybe not everybody else is doing.

And the extent to which that's happening around the industry is not really my thing. Sure. But certainly, even just in the last few weeks, we've seen like this being canceled or like this project isn't going to happen. Like I do think that folks are getting more and more discerning about how long they're going to run this along before they make a decision. Because in the past, it's probably true that in most cases it was just, even if it wasn't good, we're going to see it through the end and we'll make something on it at the, at the, at the, at the, at the, at the, the back end. But I just don't think that's the case anymore, not with the number of releases, all of the indie stuff that's out there. Like, people have too many choices, all the free to play stuff. Exactly. You've got to compete with time for a product that somebody doesn't even have to spend any money on to download and play for hundreds of hours. Like that's, you know, that is a challenge.

You really have to step up your game. Do you think it's because you're starting to see as the industry ages as we all mature, somebody catching up where it's the art catching up to the business side of it? because the business side of it before I was like, yep, Finding Dory's huge or Fonding, uh, Dory the Explorer is how I'm thinking of, but finding Dory would work too. You know,

because Disney's whole portfolio, Marvel's, you know, what Marvel did with common. Oh, sure. Here you go, Activision. Put out a Spider-Man game every nine months.

We don't give a flying fuck if it's good or bad. You know what I mean? Like that was the thing. Whereas now you see Marvel reaching out and being like, all right, or Disney reaching out and being like, all right, cool. We put a,

we have a Marvel video game guy, Bill in charge. He will then tell you what's doing anything. we're going to partner with the best people. We're going to put money behind it. Some will be exclusive. Some won't. Like, is it that the people who have been in the industry the longest are catching up and

becoming the businessmen? I'm not sure only because the phenomenon that you're talking about recently. I remember in the mid to late 90s when I, before I even got to Bethesda, I worked on the side part-time as a game reviewer and a writer for a small gaming site. and I remember going to E3 and seeing all, it was funny, like, I must have been the grim reaper of game journalists, because all the companies that I was assigned to, they were just going out of business left and right, you know, Fox Interactive and all of these folks who were doing the same kinds of stuff, you know, video games were like, oh, like everybody run in, like this is where all the money is and just anybody can put up a,

stake your claim, put out some stuff, that's right, and put out of stuff, and people will buy it. And the exact same thing happened that you're talking about. You know, we just saw Disney essentially leave. the business in terms of formally publishing their own stuff. Now they're obviously still doing some smaller things here and there, but certainly not what they were doing before, like shutting down Disney Infinity. All of that stuff, I remember in 1996, 97, 98, where all of these companies, GT Interactive and Fox and all of these other folks had stuff and it just, the next day they just weren't there. They were all gone. And so I do think it kind of comes and goes in

cycles, certainly today compared to, you know, 97, 98 is Apple's and oranges. There's so much more going on. And again, going to the indie stuff, like an avenue like Steam means that anybody can put out a game and doesn't need a publisher. You can go direct to the consumer. I think I saw that last year, more games were published on Steam last year than they were in all the previous years combined. Well, that's the environment that you're shipping a game in. And to the consumer, they don't necessarily care like where the game comes from if it strikes a chord and resonates with them. I mean, I'd like to think to your point that, like, yes, it means something to somebody that we're making dishonor too, that hopefully that says

something about, you know, we're working with arcane and we're doing something that's interesting and unique and is really going to push things. But I'm trying to get you to part with your money. You're going to decide ultimately whether that's a thing you want to do or you want to go over here and try, you know, a couple of indie things and this free to play thing and this other, like you've got a lot of choices now how you want to spend your time and money. And so using that example of a dishonor too. This is something I asked you yesterday, so bear with me. But I'll put a new spin on it for you. Okay. Which I maybe I will, maybe I won't. It's not like people don't ask me the same question over a noble. But we had a really good conversation. And we kept saying that was good question. And I was like,

we did it. We did have some good questions. Uh, no, the question was yesterday that I think stands is what is success to you guys and how do you set expectations? Because like I was saying yesterday, Dishonor two drops. And I thought that was an interesting sequel to make. Because I remember when dishonor came, people loved it. Don't get me wrong. It had an audience, but it had that audience where it had the Twitter audience that I follow. It had like your Mitch Dyer's and it had your video game critics really liked this game. But we knew it didn't set the world on fire in terms of like unit sold. Right. Like it has an audience. People love it. It reminds me a lot of like Amir's Edge, right? We're like, sure, that game people enjoy. All right, cool. And there's like

a sec that think it's amazing. Okay, great. Dishonor 2 comes around and again, IGN's game of the year. People are giving it crazy scores. It's awesome. But it seems like it doesn't set the world in fire again sales. Were you guys expecting that? Is that a successful game to you because it spoke to the dishonor audience and it got these scores that you guys like? Or is it like, we expected more out of that? Not that we just put a two at the title, but similar to how people always talk about Uncharted 2 and the PlayStation ecosystem of where Uncharted 1, you played because you were a PlayStation fan and you were there. And then everyone talked about it to the point that when Uncharted 2 came, there were millions more PS3s on the streets. So people were like, oh, I've heard about this game. Sure.

And then they dropped and it went off. I mean, the answer to your question is we look for success to come in a variety of forms. Obviously, those come from different places. So the developers can spend all of their time making and developing the best game possible. And while we involve them in sales and marketing and promotion so that they're vested in and a part of that and can help guide it to make sure what we're doing is true to the game and the game experience, they don't really have much, if any, influence over how many copies ship or how many sell or any of that stuff.

So, you know, you don't want your devs focused too much on those things because it's not really in their control. Just like you don't want, I mean, you want sales and marketing to be bought into the vision that the devs have and be able to take it and explain it to their audience. But it's not my team or sales or anybody else's job to make the game more. fun or to make this level more interesting or whatever. Like, that's not why we hired you and that's not why we hired them. So you want across all of your different disciplines for people to have success and in the areas that matter to them. You want, you know, editor's choice awards and game of the

nominations and awards and to be well thought of. And for the fans, you know, who share their opinion and share their voice to say, this is really good. You know, it was worth my time. It was worth my money. I recommend it to others. I give it this good score wherever on Steam, on Metacritic, whatever. You certainly want that. You want the sales. You want it to be a commercial viable success to sell copies because we are a business. We're not the national endowment for the arts, right? You don't have a giant bucket of money that we sort of grab and hand to a developer and say, okay, you take this off and go make your piece of art. And whenever you're done, sweet and we'll sell it. And if you need more money from the bucket, just let us know.

We just keep getting the bucket refilled. We'll be fine. Like, no, we're a business. And ultimately, we are, even though we're privately held in the business of like making money. So we don't want to live hand to mouth either. I have lots of people now who work in my group all over the world. Like, I want those people to feel secure in what, and what they are doing and who they work for because we're doing good job of making money and selling the things that we do. The answer to your question is do I think dishonor to is a success for what it was. Certainly I think it was a success for the reasons you mentioned, which is it's a great game that kind of moves the franchise forward and bring something new to the genre, some of the things we did. Like I think that crack in the slab mission that's later on in the game is one of the more amazing things I've ever seen and really different from anything else I've seen just technologically, like having this thing where you're looking into the past and then everything else rendering around you is a in the present. Like, it's just, it's crazy how they pulled that off.

From a sales standpoint, there's never been a game where I said, we sold enough, we should really stop. Like, could we not sell anymore? Stop print and fall out for it. Like, seriously, you're embarrassing me. Like, yeah, like, Skyrim, there was no pause where it was like, guys, really, it's too much. Just keep it, you know, we'll put it back on sale later.

You always want to sell. You always want to sell more. And sometimes what we see is there are games that have very different sales terms in terms of what the tail looks like. And we live in a interesting time where because of different things that we do like QuakeCon and other sales that we can bring things back that have been out for a while. And it's amazing the flood of people that will come in to buy something that like that thing has been out for two years. Like why now did you decide it was worth 30 bucks? Yeah. Yeah. Because it was 30 bucks last year and it was 30 bucks six months ago. But today for some

reason you're like, I got to have that for 30 bucks. So you do get longer, longer tails. And I think we try and take a wider vision. But every game has got to be its own thing. You can't, you can't say, look, everything has to be Skyrim or fallout four or it's an abject failure. You look at, you know, what are the cost to develop it? And what are you going to spend to promote it and get the word out there? And what do you think you should do for that kind of thing? You can't take, you can't take very disparate games and say, oh, well, they'll all achieve the same thing. Every studio is different. Every project is different.

And I think we try as best we can to be realistic about what we're making and the audience it's for and what we expect success to be. Loaded question in coming. Okay. Do you think, or does Bethesra, however you want to phrase a question, was fallout four a success? Yeah. Okay.

Next. No, because I was talking about it, right? And it was a question I asked you yesterday in a simple, not the same fashion. But the fact of the matter was like to be, you know, transparent. PSI love you went live today. And it's about open worlds. And a kid wrote in.

The kid wrote in and he was like, so what's the deal with Fallout 4? Because you guys never talk about it that much. I know Greg Platten, big Colin, did you ever finish the story, blah, and it was that conversation that we had yesterday,

both on and off camera. I was just like, Fallout 4 I loved, obviously. I platinum did, right? But it didn't resonate with me the way Fallout 3 did. And I feel like that's a line across the industry in a way

where people revere Fallout 3 and fallout four, we all played and were like, oh, it was more Fallout. Great. But that was the thing, right? That was the response. It was more Fallout. Awesome. And so you didn't see people falling all over themselves to give you a game of the year words. You want them. Don't get me wrong. I'm not taking anything away from the game. It sounds like I fucking hated the game. No, but I think the point you were making was when Fallout 3 showed up, it was

for us making Fallout games. It was our first stab at it. There had been Fallout games and one and two and they're two of the greatest games ever made, but they weren't made by us and Fallout 3. was the first one that we made that says, this is how we think about Fallout and what a fallout game is for us. And it was really well received and kind of sent ripples in a way through like what people expected and the tone and the vibe and all of that stuff. And when you do another one, well, it's not it's not the first one again.

Yeah. To your point, like there's going to be some commonalities. Like you can't just react to VATs and Fallout Fallout. the way that you did in fall three because in fall three you saw it for the very first time you're like shit this is a really cool interesting way to kind of bring that targeting different body parts but to a first person shooter in a way I understand and there's numbers and yeah exactly role playing right you just like well how is that supposed to have the same impact in fallout four like it evolved and it was a little different but you still knew what it was like it wasn't like it shocked

you or caught you off guard so I do think there's something to that but to answer your question fall four has got to be the most successful game we've ever launched in our company's history more than sky in terms of like what we did but part of it is just that phenomenon of well you have some level of experience and interaction with the with the game already and so you know I feel the same way about if you played uncharted four and that was your first game I think you have a very different reaction to what that game is than if like me you played one two and three because I'm Chartered four is more of one, two, and three. Like, ending is one of my favorite endings in a game ever.

It was mind-blowingly good, but like... It means something because you have all that history. I went out of order. So my first Uncharted was Uncharted 2, and then I went back to one and then played three. But my first interaction with Uncharted 2 and seeing those cutscenes was transcendent. Like, I had never played a game where I cared so much about the cutscenes, and my wife would stop whatever she was doing because she wanted to watch.

and see the story. And I wasn't allowed to play the game when she wasn't around because she wanted to see what was happening, how the story was progressing. Like if I had played one, my reaction to that isn't the same because I would have had exposure to this is how these guys tell story and cut scenes and character and it's really good. I just, I think that's true for a lot of stuff. Fallout 4 is in that respect, no different. So this is, you're not going to answer. Well, you'll, you'll dance. I'm going to get to that in a second, too. Hold on. But do you think then for the next fallout you guys make, do you think it'll be,

like, is there, is there a, in the studio, is there an idea of like, we got to be so different next time. We have to go in a different direction, or is it, we had a lot of great stuff and we just need to iterate and change

and make it still feel like what we think our fallout is. Does that make sense? It does make sense. Whether it's fallout or elder scrolls or whatever it is they're going to do next, I think their mantra is always like, um,

we really got to step up our game. Because in the case of Bethesda Game Studios, they have had, if it's not unique, it's certainly historic level of success with their titles. When you look at Oblivion, Fall at 3, Skyron, fall at 4,

that is four consensus game of the years. And it's impossible not to feel the pressure of expectations in that situation, where like whatever that is the next thing that they announced, there is a level of expectation of that shit better be really good.

Like, it better blow my mind and be awesome in terms of fun and what you're bringing to the table. Like, I do think on some level they feel that. But I think a lot of that feeling comes from internal. Like, you don't get to that level of success without having a lot of drive yourself to say, you know, I want to make something awesome and cool and different. So the answer to your question is I think, yes, it's not a conversation when I like run across people in the hallway. Like, hey, Chapman, do you feel pressure to like, no, you. We need to blow it up. What do we need to do?

But I've known those folks and worked with them and alongside them enough to know that there is a lot to that. That you don't achieve that level of success without having some amount of drive and holding yourself to a standard internally. And honestly, one of the things that I think makes Todd special as a game developer is he sets and pushes that team to a really high bar. He gets a lot of attention and praise as he should as the head of that. studio because he's the head of that studio. But those games don't happen without a huge team of people, which is kind of always his point. Like the focus isn't supposed to be on me. It's supposed to be on the team. But what part of, I think, what he does for that team is he sets a pace and a bar in terms of this is where we're going to go and how we're going to push ourselves. And I'll generalize

conversations I have had with him in the past, which is, yeah, I do think he feels some amount of responsibility, pressure, whatever you want to call it to say, the next thing that we do has really got to throw the rock forward and to really move things, you know, not just a little bit, but big, big leaps. How tough is that for him? And then for all your teams to an extent to have that, fans feel like they own these games. And that's the thing where I, even when, even before the big press conference in 2015, which I feel for me, cements Bethesda is like, oh, these guys are a pillar in a way. I don't think I was thinking of them before. What always stands out to me is that when I'd go to Apex, whatever,

I'd walk by and do my tours when I sell it IG on my little notepad, seeing all these games. And the best, there's the booth in store always had to line out of it, where you guys were selling Vault 101 hoodies or shirts this way.

And you had an audience that was so attached to it. And now it's that same thing where Fall 3 comes out, nobody knows what to expect. It sets the standard. Everybody is in love with it. And then Fallout 4 comes out and is all, some people love it,

some people aren't. Like, I think about like how much I enjoyed it and how this morning on Reddit, I used the Fallout subreddit. And a guy put up a post that was like, I just hope Fallout 5 isn't like this. And it was a screenshot from Fallout 3. And it was,

you had to pick your response to talk to this person. And it was, you know, the very straightforward, I've been hurt. It was the sarcastic, like, I need fucking help. And then it was something else. And then it was a thing from Fallout 4

where it was just the buttons and it was like, unsure, blah, blah, blah, blah. And like, you know what I understand? We're like, you didn't show out the lines. And for me personally, that was one of my favorite things about, fallout for is that oh i'm just going to select the tone of what i want to say and then i get i get to

treat you do a conversation in a cutscene but this person didn't like it and it's like well fuck you're damned if you do damned if you don't how do you do this well the way you do it is there's no universe in which you can make video game and take into account everybody's opinion it is it is physically impossible it is physically impossible to market or sell a game is impossible to make it as it possible to please everybody because i guarantee you there's people out there who are like um you should shoot yourself in the head and never make games again because what you do is awful. And I hate it. I mean, I've read the,

I've read the, I've read the reviews, like, played this game for 100 hours and it's literally unplayable. And it wasn't, they weren't being funny. Like, like,

okay, well, that guy, I'm never pleasing. Like, what, what everybody is looking for is going to vary. The best that you can do is take a look at how people reacted.

Todd has a saying, I hope he doesn't kill me for sort of sharing all of his little secrets. But I do think he's incredibly insightful and does have sort of really good ideas and notions. And his thing is always, don't listen to their solutions, listen to their problems, right? So in the case that you're talking about, it's not like, I think it should be like this. Like, yeah, everybody's got an idea for a video game. Everybody's got an idea for a feature. What we really need to be focused on, what is the thing that they're trying to communicate in terms of,

this is something I didn't like or something I wish was different or something I wish I could do that I couldn't or whatever it is. Mods are a great way to do that. Not to look at like somebody made this specific thing, but it's more like, what are they trying to add to the game? What kind of experiences are they looking for that they aren't getting? And I think that was a big part of where, you know, the ability to build your own, build your own settlements and to do all of that was like, yeah, people want to like,

they don't just want a house, like, they want their house. They want to be able to like, this is what I want it to look like. and I want to put like turrets here and I want this kind of furniture or this kind of stuff on the wall. It's like you look at how people react to a thing that you made and then try and figure out sort of in alongside of your own ideas and notions about what you want to do. How do we go forward from here to not make everybody happy or give everybody a dialogue system that everybody's going to like? Because guess what?

That solution doesn't exist. It's not out there. It's not possible. Something that somebody loves is something that somebody else hates or wishes with different. And like that doesn't mean you can't try and be better, but you're just not going to please everybody. So figure out how you want to evolve thing and take into account like what are the things that people are looking for more of or less of or the problems they want you to solve. And then let's see if we can come up with ways to do that in a way that we believe in and that we think will work and kind of, you know, do what I said, throw the rock forward. Sure.

move things ahead. I like that a lot. I'm just trying to remember that. Look at the problem, not the solution. Yeah. Because that's that, because like that,

because even if you like boil down, you know how we, we live in a 140 character world, right? Yep. Like kids will still tweet me now and talk because like when it got down to my final trophy for the platinum in fall four was the make everybody happy in the settlement, right?

This is really hard to do. Exactly. Because it's like, at the time, none of us knew. Send everybody away. I'm putting 4,000 rugs on the ground and statues everywhere. Send everybody away and just distill it down to exactly what you have to.

Exactly. Exactly, exactly. But that, for me, like, becomes the problem of, it turned on me of like, I hate baseball. I hate the building. I hate doing this and blah, blah. And it like, so like for me, like, right, if you hear that, my solution is cut it, go back to just being fought. But then to think about it, like, what were my real problems? Well, I didn't like how my walls didn't line up perfectly. Right. Exactly. Well, that's a solution you could fix. I'm like, fuck, that actually, you start thinking about it in a different way and that would turn it around. Huh. That's good. Um, so stick with me on this one. I want to know. why you're the way you are and why you're who you are and why I think you're kind of a unicorn in the industry and then going away from that for a second who's who's who's you like are you talking about me you oh you you you personally yeah but it's also I think part of the bethsda character maybe and then I'm going to ask you do you remember our first interaction on twitter okay which one you want me to answer first the interaction one no okay Colin and I on beyond early on we're talking shit about Skyrim and how it wasn't running on PS3 and how like it was crashing all the

stuff. And this is well doc, it was already, we knew there, the problem was out. People knew about the thing, right? And, you know, Megan Sullivan and IGN was troubleship. Yep. And we were doing the thing of like, we are, by the way, this is when you're still at IGN. Correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so we're like, this is like as it's happening. So this is what? When did Skyrim on PS3 was? Was 11, 11, 11. Yeah. Yeah. So this was probably like December. Exactly.

That or, yeah, right after the new year or something. And we're talking about it. And a. a fan tweeted you saying, hey, the guys on Beyond have a question about why this isn't running. And you responded back to him. He's like, I've tried to talk to IGN. I'm not doing it again. And I was like, hey, we haven't.

Whoa, I haven't talked to you. And I'm sorry. And you were just like, I've tried to talk. And I was like, fuck. Like, this guy's calling it like he sees it in public. And that's, and even to this day now, the way you tweet and the way you communicate and the way you talk on this podcast, you don't talk like you are the vice president of marketing and PR.

You talk like you are. You are in an indie studio and you don't have to answer to anybody and everything else. Because like a great example and I think I didn't see Colin's final script. But his Colin was right. That'll be live by the time you see this audience. It's about, you know, getting data in hard facts and hard opinions from big companies about video games and how the political climate and all this stuff. And he's firing out of these emails and not getting responses. You know what I mean?

And that's when you start asking real questions, quote unquote, when there is a definitive answer about something. usually you don't see or hear from anybody, right? But for you, you are out there on the front lines, tweeting and talking all the time and answering fans and answering PR people and press people and all. And it's just, I don't, why are, why do you think you're able to do that?

Why are you like that and other people can't be? Why can you be so opinionated? Whereas like, if you were to talk, like, I guess like, think about like, you're, in terms of presence, in terms of talking for a company, you are equivalent to Shuehiyushita for PlayStation. Okay. You will respond and talk and he'll take photos at a Nintendo event and nobody's like,

okay, cool. You'll go out and tweet about what you're playing and it's not a Bethesda game and who cares. But everybody else, like the PR people for PlayStation, the PR people for Microsoft, with the exception, maybe a Major Nelson, but even him, they're on brand to an extent. You're a gunslinger. That's right. I wasn't prepared for this question. I like to give you something new.

You know what I mean? Just because we did it. We did a two hour pre-interview yesterday. doesn't mean I'm not going to have stuff for you. First of all, I'm relieved that I wasn't a huge prick to you when we interacted on on Twitter. And I correct me if I'm wrong audience, but I want to say we've done a kind of funny video since then that maybe it was a Q&A, maybe it was something.

And somebody's like, who did you want on the show? And I was like, you because I felt like, not that there was bad blood. I do remember out of nowhere, like at one point, it's somebody, I got a bunch of like, hey, Game Over Gregory wants you on the show. Well, it's because like, and it just sort of came out of left field. And that was the thing is like, you know what I mean, like my career arc and how much, I mean, like when we initially pop up, first of up, first of all Twitter to everyone's new at the time. And it's like, it's like, whatever. And then some some fucking podcast from IGN's doing it. I'm sure you're like, well, I'm talking to IGN already for their news stories. I don't need, you know what I mean? But for us, we're like, oh, fuck. Like, I want to talk to you out. I want to have conversations with you about it. Well, here's my best swipe at an answer. Number one, important to realize that. In a lot of ways, my background at Bethesda is very much what an indie shop would look like.

1999, I get hired by that company to be the director of PR and marketing. It was a handful of devs, the president, a sales assistant. I had a marketing artist, Todd Vaughn, our VP of Development, or Director of Development, I guess, at the time was there. And like as far as Bethesda goes, that was about it. So for the first until 2005, I think, was when I hired Aaron Losey to come in and do actual PR and marketing with me. I did all the community stuff. I did all the PR. I did all the marketing.

Whatever it was, like, I did it. I worked on the box. I worked on the ads. I worked on the trailers. I was in the forums talking to people. Like, that was just what I knew. And I'm a big believer in as much as possible trying to be open and honest and communicate. with people the best I can.

Full disclosure, it is not always serve me well because things that I say where I'm like, you know, joking and like, you know, trying to be funny and somebody takes it as a complete insult or backhanded slap or I'm being like, ooh, why are you so savage? Like, savage, like somebody asked me like how, the answer to a question, to your point, like, I have 140 characters, like, you could just Google that. Like you don't really, right? So like I remember the specific incident recently when somebody asked me a question,

I was like, look, if you Google from my name or Todd's name and about this, like you'll find a number of interviews with that. And I got this feedback from a couple of folks. Like, why are you such a dick to people? Like, well, I thought I was just trying to help point that person to a much better answer than I can give you in 140 characters. Like I don't just get to go on and on like I get to do here with you

where I get to provide the proper context and so forth. But the base thing is I do think, that level of interaction is important. Now, I am by far not the only person at our company who does that. I have an amazing global community lead, Matt Grandstaff, who works with our community team and Jess and Jason and Evan and Jess. They spend all of their time on social, like talking to people and trying to answer questions, but I still think it's important for me to do it because even though I have the title that I have, that's not really how I view myself.

Sure. That makes sense. I'm just a guy at Bethesda trying to do my job the best I can. And sometimes maybe I'm a little bit more candid than I should be. Somebody once asked me, like, how do you deal with all of the, like, hate or like people answering you, asking you about Tess 6 and when it's coming out or to confirm or deny some rumor about a game? Like, well, truth of them is every now and then I just try and be a little funny or whatever

to like let a little steam. off. Yeah. And not in a mean, but hopefully just, I mean, sometimes it's mean, but if it's mean, it's 100% of time because it's directed at an asshole who just says something like, you know, fuck you and fuck Bethesda and you suck and like, yeah, I'll give that guy shit back. I don't care.

Most of the time I just go in and mute them because I love the, I love the idea of people screaming into the void and thinking that I'm- This is my argument. Me and Colin argues, I got to block. I'm like, no, no, no, no, don't block them. Like, I block people who are like, who way overdue it. and it gets to the point where it's like, like, like,

you know, I've had people threaten my kids. Like, you know, people get, Skyrim, PS3 did me no favors. Because they're looking to scream at somebody.

They don't run, they don't want to scream at a building, right? Sure. They want to scream at a guy. Like, even if it's not the guy in charge, I want a face,

I want a name that I can yell at and vent my frustrations because I'm unhappy and upset. As well you should. Like, you're a consumer. You spent money. You're pissed off. Like,

it doesn't matter to you that it's not my fault. You're just mad. Yeah. You have a right to be. But I do love the mute function. It's my favorite thing in the world because of that. Because oftentimes I get a little bit like I feel a little better inside when I know. I will never have to read what that person says again.

And they're just going to scream into the void. And they have no idea that I've just, I've muted you and you're just yelling at a wall in a basement. Uncle Touchy's naked puzzle basement somewhere like screaming into the dark corner. That's a Pat and Oswald reference for the Indian fans out there. So I do feel like that level of interaction is important, and I want people to know at the very least that they're being heard. It's amazing how many times that I've simply responded and said, I'm sorry, you feel that way. You know, I understand. Or we were talking about this a little bit yesterday.

People like, well, I don't want to pay $60 for the Skyro and Special Edition. You know, it should be 30. And I say, like, okay, you get to decide how to spend your money. If it's not worth $60 to you, I totally get it. And people take that as like, oh, you're just being a jerk. Like, no, I'm not. I'm being respectful. I'm telling you, like, you decide how to spend your money.

I don't get to decide that. I don't try and I don't ever try and change your mind or convince you of something because I don't think it's possible. I think I can put out information about what we're doing that you can look at and say, that interests me and I want to buy it or that's not my cup of tea and I don't care. Sure. But that's on you. That's not on me. And I'm going to do what our job.

I'm going to try and do my job the best way I can to be kind of honest and say like, like, this is the game that we're making. I don't think I've ever had anybody say, like, you guys misrepresented the game. Like, it totally wasn't like that or anything. Like, I think we're pretty true to what the experience is because I think that's what good marketing and PR is. It's taking the experience you're going to have playing it and bringing it out in trailers and screenshots and how we talk about it. But that's just who I am. Like genuinely, Greg, I really, I love to help people. and I care a lot about my company.

I care about our fans and it makes me feel good to try and answer questions, help people out. Like, I enjoy that. You got to take the good with the bad and you're going to piss people off when you do it or somebody's going to take it the wrong way. No matter what. I've apologized to people that to my core, I was like, I do not want to apologize to this person. Or they are totally misstating what I'm doing. But I was like, you know what?

I'm going to bite the bullet. And I'm going to just say, like, yep, my bad. bad, you know, whatever I've shared bad information or said dumb stuff. I've never once deleted a tweet because something I said didn't go over well. Like, I own up to it. I said it and I'll take whatever crap I'm going to get for it because I think that's how people should operate. And not everybody does, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to hold myself to that standard. That's, you know, that's who I am. I'm going to stay true to myself. No, I mean, what you're, it's funny of so much of what you said is how I feel about everything I do, right? And that,

was the problem of being at IGN a lot of the times, was the fact that, all right, cool. Oh, they tell us, okay, no more cursing on a podcast, right? And so we do a podcast where we don't curse. And then we get a million questions, like, what's happening? Because we're like, oh, we are close on that one. Yeah. And then next week, I'm like, oh, we are told not to curse. And then I get pulled in an office. And like, why did you mean? Why? That's how that, it's what you asked me to do. And like, they, but they didn't, like, that transparency wasn't what they were looking for. And the same thing happens here. Like, we talk about all the time. Like, we were talking about it yesterday, I think. There comes a point where you get to the

gap and you're like, all right, cool. We're not going to cross. This isn't a relationship that has to exist. We call our kids, you know, our fans best friends, right? Because it is. If you come in and you adopt this and your, our kids are awesome to each other and awesome to other people in the industry and do all these amazing things. But, you know, like, there's, you just know at a glance with a comment that, okay, you're not, this isn't going to work. And there, we put up a video over the weekend where I did a, a, a, we do these new things where we have these videos where on Patreon, if you support us at $15 and above, you can, you get all the benefits, obviously, of the rest of the perks below it, but you also get to, uh, be part of these AMAs where you ask us

question and then we make a video when we put it up on YouTube. We did the first one. And this kid commented and he was just like, 15 bucks, man, you're ripping off your fans and he didn't even watch the whole video because at the end I'm like, remember, you get everything else. This isn't just, you're not just paying $15 to get your question, right? And it, and so like, he was like, I'm leaving and I'm never coming back. And some kid was like, buy whatever his name was.

And I responded back. I was like, see you later. Bob, by his name. And then so many kids responded to that. And then it's like, Greg's ego truly has gone. to his head and like this was Tim's dream but Greg's the one who's off there and then they're like well Colin's meant and I'm like all right guys it's like what do you it's such nonsense and honestly it goes back to what I said about game development which is there's no pleasing everybody um and ultimately

like there there I totally agree with that like buy like well like what else are you supposed to say like please don't come back like I I got to spend all day every day trying to convince every single person who doesn't want to buy Doom that they have to buy Doom like what's the current console and PC install base. Like how many phone calls am I going to have to make a day to reach everybody who didn't buy Doom? Like, that's, honestly, that's no way to live. Like, you got to focus on the people who are interested or willing to have a conversation or at the very least be respectful. You know, when I hear you talk about your, you know, sort of fan base and your and your fans, like, that's the way it should be, right? Like, just being respectful, it doesn't

mean you have to agree all the time, but you can, you can disagree and still walk away and be friends and and honestly like that's my approach if you're going to be respectful to me you don't have to like what we do but if all you're going to do is harass or you know bitch and moan and troll like yeah you go into the mute file and i'm done with you and i don't care if you like what i say or not like i i just i'm 47 years old um i've been doing this a long time and you know i've actually this year spent a lot of time talking to people on my team about things that i really want to do better. Things that I, that I'm doing that I don't, I don't like and things that I, I want to try and change. But, but there's only so much about me that I'm going to change. And I'm not going to be a

kiss-ass. And I'm not going to tell everybody they're super important and special. Or, you know, oh, no, I'm sorry. I didn't like, you don't like me. You don't like what I had to say. You got a statement. You got to go. Okay. Like, I don't think you really know anything about me, but you're allowed, again, just like our games, you're allowed to make a decision about me based on whatever criteria you want. And if you decide that I'm a jerk and not a nice person, okay, goodbye. So now, this, the philosophy you have,

and again, I think with how Bethes has been evolving or coming on the scene or whatever you want to say with it, is that reflected in the way you think of games, press, journalism, media stuff too? Because like this year, or I guess in the calendar year of last year, you guys did the thing where you're like, all right, cool, you made the statement that review copies, aren't going out early anymore.

Like you did it with Doom where Doom was like, it just dropped, you know, dropping every on the day. And so everybody's putting up their articles. Here's why you won't see a Doom review. Here's why we're doing a review in progress when we get it. Right. And then for the next time around, it was dishonored, correct? Dishonored too.

You're like, here's the official statement. We aren't going to give out review copies anymore. Well, not like early. Yeah. Sorry, my apology. Yeah. Bad phrasing. No, I knew what you meant.

Yeah. Where does that come from? Is that part of the same thing where you want to be open and honest and you want to be open and you want to talk to the audience more than you want to talk to the media? It's not either or. It comes from the same place. You know, you mentioned a little while ago about the 2015 showcase.

And like the actual reason for that wasn't just like we thought we really had a strong lineup or a lot going on or we wanted to make any specific kind of statement. It was a big. part of it was, I want to say it was in 2014, I first thought and pitched the idea to Todd specifically because I knew that Fallout was the thing we were going to be talking about the next year. And it was, one, hey, about what if you only had to do the demo once instead of having to do it every hour on the hour, like in a special theater in our room over and over all three days? Because it's exhausting. It really takes a toll on you. Talking all day, as you

will know, is not an easy thing to do. Like, it physically wears on you. But the other thing is that everything, so much of what we were doing to that point was through a filter, where we were showing something. We were showing a demo or letting people do hands-on. And then what we were doing was getting filtered out to everybody else through somebody else. And there were so many times we would do a demo and then look at the previews and be like, God, how did nobody talk about this? How did nobody mention, you know, this or this or this or all these, like, cool things

that we think the fans would be really interested in, but the fans can't see it. Right. Like, what do we do? And so it was an effort to try and do something that everybody could see. And by the way, not just like the fans, obviously that was a big part of it, like for them to be able to see directly. But it was also, you know, we book appointments in past years for Skyrim or when I met you and Colin and Colin for the fall at three demo. Like, well, how many people from IGN actually got to see or do any of that, right? It's one or two or whatever.

And then there's that mad dash in the final day. All right, you're up for the game of the show. Can we bring 15 people? Right. And you have all of these other, like, well, I want lots of people to see it. You know, whether it's a site or a magazine or whatever, like, well, I don't want just one or two people there. Sure. Like, I want everybody to be able to see.

Like, I saw that. Like, we can, we can have a conversation as opposed to it all being one direction. And so the idea of the showcase was, look, everybody gets to see it and have a conversation around it and the fans can go pour over and go frame by frame and look at stuff and talk about things that that may have gotten missed or not talked about. But everybody's kind of on the same page with the same information, the same footing. And honestly, I think our review strategy was born a lot out of that same belief, which is we were not huge fans of the notion that reviews go out there and they go into this vacuum where a select group of people will have passed a judgment

on a title and the audience that is reading that has no real information to be able to shit detect whether or not that person really got the game and is communicating clearly what's going on or didn't really get it or they agree or disagree and at the end of the day it seems like it feels like that is more, that is more genuine. That's more transparent. Like everybody has access to the same information in the same way. I'm not afraid of a review going out any number of days early. I mean, at this point, I'm not, I'm not afraid of anything. What I want is I want for people to have access to the same information. It's not that everybody who reads the review will have played it. Like, well, obviously, reviews are for plenty of people who

haven't played the game or are waiting to decide. But there's some volume of people who who say, you've played the game for 20 hours. So have I. And by the way, these things are incorrect. You miss this system. You don't understand this. Yeah. Or like, how did you not mention that you could play through everything in stealth mode?

Like, I never killed anybody. What do you mean it's a blood bath and it's just about stabbing people? Like, I played totally non-lethal. Right? There's a level of, I mean, I guess accountability is part of it, but it's more just there's no favoritism. It's more transparent. And I think, I could be wrong. I often am, but I think it lends itself to more dialogue and discussion amongst everybody as opposed to, well, these guys have this and all of these people over here when they read it, by the time they figure out how much of that was true or not true, like it's seven days, ten days old news and it's falling down the page and now there is no discussion about that. And we saw it in the case of doom and we saw it in the case of dishonor too where in either direction, you can have folks who write really gushing praise stuff.

and it's very clear this person played the game for two hours, and they have no clue what actually happened. You've read these reviews, right? I've read reviews from my own stuff that embarrassed me because it was the copy that was on the back of the box, right? I could read it and go, there's not a single sentence in this review that tells me that this person played the game. Now, people might say, well, why do you care? You got a 10 out of 10. You know why I care? Because I send a copy to that person because I assume they're professional, and I'm not looking to just get back of the box copy out there. I could have sent that copy to that. I could have sent that copy to somebody else. It's not like I have infinite copies to send. And I want somebody to

respect and take time to evaluate the thing that somebody spent three years making and you know, and poured their, their heart and soul into, like, at least have the decency to give it a fair shake and tell folks what's really going on there and to show us that you've actually played it. And by the way, I've experienced the same thing. And it's a far better way to judge for games that other people make that I play and enjoy and to be able to read and go, this person doesn't get this game at all. Like, I've played this game. I've played it for longer than you or whatever. And like, you're totally missing the point. Maybe this isn't your genre. Maybe you didn't play it, whatever. But I find that really instructive. And I think it's much better to have

that dialogue in an environment where everybody is on a more even playing for. And in the case of the two games you mentioned, like, they're really good games. Yeah. That was the concern, right? When Doom was coming up and it was day, because we've talked about it before. Like, of course, when it used to be, and still, for the most part, it's not you guys. But for a lot of times, if you're getting the game, the game on release date, fuck, something's wrong with this.

They're trying to hide something because they don't want to leave pre-orders. They don't want to do this. We were very aware of that when we were talking about this. Like, it was a real, it was a real concern and risk of like, how much crap are we going to take while we sit here silent on Doom? people are like, it must be really bad or there must be problems, like they're not sending out copies in advance. And for dishonor too, our thing, the reason we put that out was, well, all of these things went up for Doom where people without comment from us were saying those

things. And here's our article on why our Doom review isn't coming up. And there was all this conversation about transparency and so on and so forth. And we said, okay, we'll be up front. I mean, this kind of goes back to your earlier point. Like, we'll be transparent. We're going to tell why and we're going to tell you ahead of time so you're not just reading somebody's article and assuming you know why it's not going out no we're going to tell you and we're going to tell you hey if you need review scores you should totally wait like we're completely supportive of that but this is what we're doing and this is why and and now you know and and we did have some concerns about like i mean not everybody is thrilled about yeah i was going to say did it how did it go

over is because like i think when this announcement goes up a lot of people read between the lines of, all right, Bethesda saying traditional games, journalism, games, media, enthusiasts press, whatever the hell you want to call it, doesn't matter as much as it used to. And is that, I mean, do you feel like that is true? And then also like, yeah, how do, I'm not going to be asking outlet by outlet magazine by magazine, how do people respond to it? It was varied. I got, you know, most of the feedback I got was behind the scenes off the record.

And I got messages from people were like, totally good. it, understand. I got notes from other publishers like, you're awesome. I wish we would do this too. I got notes from really unhappy, angry people. And there was a lot of stuff where people didn't talk to me, but they were out on social media just blasting us for it. I don't actually think it has as much to do with like what is the value of traditional media. I still think traditional media is tremendously valuable, but it depends on who the person is. and the opinion they're giving and whether or not I respect their opinion,

which is something that has to be earned. I think the value of traditional media. Like, I still read movie reviews. I still read game reviews. I read them from sources that I respect because their take on stuff seems to jive well with mine. If you're constantly reading a reviewer who seems to completely disconnect with you

and what you like playing, well, why are you reading what that person has to say? Because you're not actually getting anything helpful unless you just do the opposite of what they say, in which, I mean, that's a weird way to go about doing. it. But for me, it's there, they, they are when they do previews and interviews and so forth. Like the value for me is, is in people who really know their stuff bringing a take or an opinion or doing analysis that I don't necessarily get somewhere else, right? You can watch our showcase

yourself. You don't need anybody else. But it's, it's fun and interesting to read other people's write-ups on it to see if they had a particularly different take or they noticed something or saw something that you didn't maybe see or think about. And you're like, oh, yeah, that's really interesting. I hadn't thought about that. Like, that's the value of those, of all of those outlets, is their ability to bring some expertise and insight and to bring a take that is enough for me to read, even if I've already seen or played or watched the thing that they're writing about. I mean, I'm a Wake Forest basketball junkie, Mizoo, and I still read articles from multiple outlets after every basketball game that I fucking watched myself. I sat there for two hours.

There's nothing about that game that that article is necessarily going to tell me about what happened. But I'm looking for the insight from the reporter to say to talk about what a player did or didn't do or a coach's insight on something that maybe I hadn't noticed. Like, that's the value. Like, I don't need their help in figuring out the score. there. I watch it. It sucked. But getting that analysis from a, from an analyst or a reporter is, I find valuable, particularly if it's one that has earned my respect by frequently being able to sort of highlight things or bring the light things that I maybe necessarily wouldn't have noticed myself. I mean, no, you're hitting the nail on head, I think, in terms of where we are and what

works and what doesn't right now in games press. In the fact that like the whole reason we exist, right, is because people just trust our opinions and they don't care if they're outdated. You know, Tim and I played Emily is away, way late and put up a lot. let's play about it. And so many people hit us up. I bought it because of you guys. And I finally got around to playing Hugh over Christmas break and tweeted about it. And so many people bought it because of that. And then Colin started playing it and talking about it too. Like there's a, there's that discovery element of it. And you want, you know, like are the most popular live streams we do on Twitch are the, all right, here's the post show to the Nintendo Switch event,

to the PlayStation event, to the Bethesda showcase. You know what I mean? Like people want to hear you talk about that. By the way, on this topic, I thought out of all of the stuff that I read and heard, I thought you guys had far and away the fairest conversation about this issue, about our review policy and why, like, I thought it was great. Like it was really, to the point, like, you guys had really good insight. You talked about, like, well, you know, we used to be on the other side of this. And, like, I mean, in fairness, like, it's not like it makes us look great. But you're, I don't remember if it was you or Colin made the point about Skyrim, Skyrim PS3. like, well, we did get early copies of Skyrim.

And it's not like we called that out or called it before the copy, right? And that's the thing about it. Whereas, and this is back in the day, IGN, back when Skyrim came out of like how broken multi-platt reviews were, where it was like, all right, cool, I'm going to play it on my platform of choice. And then I pop it in and I play 30 minutes, maybe, an hour, yeah, and say, all right, yeah, I saw this bug that I complained about over here and I didn't see this and blah, blah, and you put it out there.

Whereas like now it is that thing that, with your policy or a policy similar to this or just where we are is that things drop and they know if there's a PlayStation problem with Watchdogs 2, we would know about it. Because we're the guys who are going to do that regardless if somebody played on Xbox 1 for the IGN review of it. And that's the interesting thing in the take and give and how, you know, for us, we put up all these things on the games cast all the time of our review in progress or impressions or like, we took Flack recently because we did a, Tim did one of the games and he put it up

and he called it like kind of blah blah, whatever, game X review, right? And it was, oh, Resident Evil, I think. And I had beaten Resident Evil and then Colin was almost there and Tim wasn't. And like, this is this discussion. People are like, well, Colin, how can you call? I'm reviewing it. And also we're just giving you impressions. Like, are we that hung up right now and like how we're calling it?

I think we might be. But in any case, I just wanted to mention, like I think I sent you a note afterwards and we chatted about a little bit. But I thought at the very least that you guys were fair and at least trying to put in context and sort of see the bigger picture. And ultimately, it's just that. It's just rightly or wrongly, maybe it's the right approach, maybe it's not, but I, we think it's good to have that kind of open where everybody is part of the same dialogue and people aren't engaging on different levels. Like, well, how could you tell me whether or not the fallout four

demo was good? You didn't even see it. You just read some guys write up and like, it's way better. If you could just watch the whole thing and go, oh yeah, like, I thought that was awesome. he didn't like it or why he wrote that. I thought it, you know, whatever it is. It's, I think it's just an interesting glimpse at how you guys have to deal with the business that's constantly changing and the fact that live streams and Twitch and, you know, just the audience in general, the fan, the dishonored fan, how much that, if you run a dishonored YouTube channel and you have 20,000 subs, you probably matter a bit more in terms of what's your opinion on this game versus somebody who's just like, cool, I work for GameSight X and I've gotten dishonored and now I'm going to go review it. I think

there's something to that. Sure. I agree with that. Yeah, exactly. Like in to that, because when you're talking about to a hardcore audience or something like that. And people are always up and oh, well, does this mean of like, will people not preview their games? Will they not do this? Is there going to be blowback from it? And it was like, well, if there is, do you want to be part of that site to that go to that place that's going to play ball like that? Because this wasn't a malicious move on your part. No. No. And again, like, I think there's value. Again, even if I can watch a demo, I still think there's value in reading somebody else's preview for the insight. Like, well, I, maybe it's a sequel and I never played the original ones and I'm looking for some insight on like

the mass effect is a bad idea but like I'm looking for somebody who's maybe played all of them and I haven't and they can give me a little bit more information like well I didn't have the entire context for what I just watched sure sure yeah 100% 100% and so then this is something in the same vein that we talked about yesterday I want to dial it over there so do you how do you when you get a bad preview, what does that do to you? And the example I gave yesterday was Evil Within is that when you guys showed Evil Within for the first time at Pax East, me, Damon, I think I'm already somebody else from IGA and went and sought behind closed doors.

Dave Klayman was giving us the demo. Good old Dave. Good old Dave Klayman. And we left and we're all like, okay, that's, that looks rough. That's in bad shape. This isn't, and we did a video where like none of this, you know, and then a lot of other people said the same thing. And then it was like, Evil Within comes out.

It's awesome. I'm like, oh, fuck, like, we missed the context, and this wasn't, and like, is that, that was when you were doing, hey, come into this room and we're going to give the 15 times a day over and over again every 30 minutes. Like, what did that preview mean to you guys? Well, and we talked about this a little bit yesterday in the context of, like, well, in that particular case, why didn't you think you were in trouble on the evil within from a dev standpoint? point, you know, that one was really more of a failing on the part of good game, bad demo. Like, I don't think people don't always realize how difficult it is to put together a good demo of something. That Prey2 demo was great.

Yeah, it was. And people don't also realize that a great demo does not always equal a game that's either great or even shippable. And I think in that case, I think we, myself, my group, Dev, production, whoever, just put something together that didn't really have the right context for this is what this game is about and trying to do, whether we picked a bad part and threw you into the deep end of the pool or whatever it was. We just picked the wrong mix of stuff to give you the context for this is what is good about this game. And to use a name,

I keep dropping. One of the reasons why Todd is excellent at what he does is. is he already knows when he's making a thing, what the demo for that product. Like, he can tell you, I guarantee you, I haven't actually asked him, but I know he knows the answer. Like, your next game, do you know what the first trailer,

the reveal trailer looks like? I guarantee you he knows what the box looks like. I guarantee you he knows what he wants to show off in the demo. Now, it may not end up being that thing, but he has a vision and his head of how am I going to take all of this? how the hell am I going to take Fallout 4, Fallout 3 Skyrim, hundreds of hours of open-ended gameplay and distill it down into a nugget that you walk away and go,

like, shit, I got it, right? Like, because you could show off Skyrim and have it suck. Like, you can't. I mean, it'll look cool, but if you just wander through the wilderness and never find anything and never pick anything up and you don't fight anybody and you just kind of wander aimlessly through it, and in 15 minutes you go, okay, well, that's the demo. Thanks for coming.

Have a good D3. Like, people are going to like, what in the hell? like is that a walking simulator? What did I just see? So it does take talent and insight, even on the part of the people making the game to come up with something that takes what you're making and distills it down into a digestible chunk that people can take away and understand, whether that takes five minutes or 15 minutes or 50 minutes. It's not always easy to do. And it's something we actually more and more. And I was talking earlier about going through the process of shipping a game with somebody and what that's like and how it gets better the second time around.

Like this is actually part of it. Like having conversations around when are we going to announce it? When are we going to release it? And like how many beats in between do we have? Like can we get away with just having to do like one demo or two? Because every time you do a demo, you're taking time away from making a final thing that goes in a box to give me a small digestible thing, whether it's hands on or it's a, you know, it's video or whatever. Like it takes time away. Like, because there's games made like that. It's not like, all right, we finish everything in this level. Let's move on. At any given moment, any game in the world has something going on that makes it fucked up and completely uncapturable on video, right? There's a lighting bug. There's an animation bug. There's

something. There's a collision thing, whatever it is. And so you have to spend time on that tiny little section of the world fixing all of that stuff just in that one instance, even if that's not the way you would fix it across the whole game necessarily because E3 is coming. We don't get to move E3 date and we need to have something to show people, you know, in a showcase that everybody's going to see, like, this is the thing that we're making. And so it is definitely a challenge. You know, we haven't always done it right. We've done really good ones. My favorite ones that we've done is always ones where we just, somebody comes in and we hand the controller the fall three one where I met you and Colin where it's just like, look, you got an hour for us. You got 57 minutes.

Here's a controller. You're going to start outside the vault and go. What do you mean go? Like, just go. Wherever you want to go, whatever you want to do. You know, one, don't go past this dialogue thing. You don't spoil the main story for everybody, but otherwise do whatever hell you want. Have fun. And just letting people get loose in the world.

Those are the most fun to read. You know, we talk about like, why do you read? Because you read all the different ways that people sort of express themselves or tried things. Or, you know, there's journalists who would be like, well, everybody I talked to went this way. So I went the exact opposite way. because I wanted to see, is there anything there? How does the game adapt? What is there to do?

That always speaks to me and what you guys, the quality of your games, and even before, like, I really think you've come into your own or whatever the hell you want to say, before you become like this fucking all-star. When I, with the same packs where Evil Within was in that room, you had Wolfenstein out there with a whole bunch of sessions. And I actually, what had happened is we went and saw Evil Within

and then the next day came back. And that's when I saw Dave Klayman against a wall like this. And I'm like, how you doing? And he's like, we're doing fine. We're doing it. I'm like, all right, great. I'm gonna go play Wolfensign. And then I walked in.

I'm like, all right, I'm here to do my Wolfstein demo. Like, all right, cool. Here's your control on your headphones. It's two hours. And I was like, wait, what? Like, I thought it was gonna be like a 15 minute demo. It's like, oh, no. And it started off.

Like, I'm not that big of a shooter guy. And it totally was like, all right, all right. And then by the end, I'm like, when I put down the control and left, I was like, that game's really good. Like, like, holy shit. Like, no wonder that us played two hours of it. They're super confident. And like, especially for a game that didn't have any, didn't have any buzz.

I mean, it was Wolfenside. That's a name. But a thing of like, yeah, this studio you've never heard of is making Wolfenside. With a banged up brand. I mean, we also went into that knowing like it's not like that was a household name. And every game in that was, was, was, yeah. Like we, we had to sort of, you know, hit the reset button on that and say, look, you know, don't worry about that what that was.

Just focus on what these guys are doing now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't judge up based on what came before. Final question from me, and then we'll go through reader mail. Yeah, quick five. Yeah, yeah. I think I'd be remiss not to ask. You talked, you know, we talked about transparency.

We talked about how you've handled it. You handle it with the audience, how you've handled it with the game review policy and stuff like that. I think we'd be remiss not to talk about the mod thing that happened where you guys put up the mods for fallout four. Oh, where I was like, hey, we've done all we can. It's not coming to PlayStation unless they fix it. Was that number one? Colin talked about it yesterday for a second, and I agree that it was like a brilliant move

to either be like, hey, we've played all our cards. Like this is where we want to talk to you and explain to you what's happening and this is what's happening. Hopefully Sony fixes it. But was there a complete terror of like Sony be like, all right, well, fuck you. You're never making games with this again. I don't know about complete terror,

but I also think we reached a point given where we were and the fact that like it had reached the state of parity across all platforms. But on this one, like, it wasn't out and we don't have ultimate say on what we can or can't do. There's rules for every console. If you were to go out and design a game console,

you should be allowed to design the rules for. This is what you can do and this is what you can't do. And in this case, we couldn't go forward, we couldn't talk about everything that were the reasons why. So we just had to give the basic thing of, look at, works and it's not hasn't been approved and we don't really know what's going to happen next because we just felt like we couldn't sit there and continue to say nothing when we had done as you said everything that we could and didn't really know which direction that was going to go from there it

could have gone straight into the in the toilet someone argued that was already the toilet but we could have gone straight in the toilet from there and never gotten anywhere or we could get to where we where we are today, where, you know, folks from Sony, folks from Bethes, the game studios got together and worked the problem and came up with a solution that we could get through and we said, okay, well, then, like, that's what we're going to do. But yeah, I just think at that point, we felt like it had been long enough and we had done, I guess everything we felt like we could do that was in our power and we needed to say something because at the end of the day, it was our fans.

They bought our game. They had a level of expectation. And to continue to just sort of say, no update, check back next week, which just at some point becomes no longer viable. Was there a moment when all that started where we're like, we're never making another PlayStation game? Because I feel like PlayStation 3 was Skyrim, right? It was like, God damn it.

All right, everybody gets to hard work and then fall out for you. Like, here we go. We're back. Oh, God damn. Another PlayStation problem. No. No. No.

because that's how we were I did say the last thing I was like I was like God damn it again you know in part because to my previous point

like people don't like yelling at buildings or logos they want to yell at somebody yeah yeah yeah yeah they yell at it is me and you know I got it

fall at four on returning the grace and the thing that they always yell at me about Greg is like you're an Xbox fan you hate PlayStation and I remember saying

at one point one of those like maybe not the best thing like I should have checked my swing but I was like dude do you know how many

goddamn Sony consoles that I own like I own three PS3s and three PS4s and two Vitas and a PSB. Like I love PlayStation's. I got headphones and a jack in the play. Like I love this console. I love this thing I wanted to work. I was playing fall out three,

uh, fallout four on a PlayStation. Like I can't play mods either. Like this pisses me off too, but that doesn't mean we're wrong or not trying. Um, and you know, it was,

it was a different situation. In the case of Skyron PS3, it was, that like look we made the game we had some problems with the game running on that console it was 100% down to us

to fix it and address it which which we did and ultimately solved so speaking of PlayStation consoles this thing that we forgot to do on the episode we lost so this is no longer a surprise

but it's still funny it's so very nice this is awesome so back when I was traveling I think I was headed to London and you started PlayStation Vita relocation program. And you asked like, hey, have you got a Vita shoved in a corner or whatever?

And I was like, actually, I got two. One's in my office and one somewhere in my house. This is the one in my house. An OLED one, no less. Which I reset and brought to you to give away to one lucky, kind of funny game. The Vita Relocation program grows to five now,

I believe. So whoever gets this. More than 2,000 people want the Vitas. We have five. One day I'll have to mail them out. But whoever gets it, Please give it a good home. Love it.

Take good care of it. Make sure you polish the screen every day. Thank you, Kev. But, yeah, I want to contribute to the Vita Relocation. I'm glad. I still got my other one. So it's not like I'm making a complaint sacrifice. But, you know, I can make do with one.

Yeah. It's probably just because I hate that you're just trying to cover up that you guys are such Xbox InVoys. It's probably just because I hate PlayStation. Exactly. We all know you're in bed with the Scorpio people. I saw Todd in the video. Kiss my ass.

Talking about his terraflops. I don't even know what the hell's going on. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. in there. Don't know those different stuff. All right.

So here we go. First off, I'm pretty sure I didn't say it. Patreon producer, Stephen Inzler. Thank you for your 3,000th month of support over at patreon.com slash kind of funny games. I'm going to read questions now, though, that you all, because Tim tweeted out, hey, going to have Pete Hines on. What are your Bethesda questions? You all, of course, went to kind of funny.com slash game cast questions?

No? No idea. Tim left already, right? He's, of course. He gets to rest before this thing. What half of them did was just. replied back to Tim and I and said, here's my question. Let me do that.

One of your beautiful fans was like, um, he posted a link where you're supposed to put all these. Hey, go to this link. Yeah. You go to kind of funny. I was good. I didn't answer any of them on, uh, Twitter so that I didn't ruin it, ruin the fun. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Oh, here we go. And I like this because I tried to dodge some of these because I knew last, we doubled up a lot last time, not this time. Sorry, we are says, just curious. What the thinking was behind revealing fallout for only a few months before. the game launched. It seemed to have been a very popular move at a time when we see quite a few AAA games being delayed frequently after being revealed years earlier. Do you think it's a precedent

others will follow? I don't know if it's a precedent. As I said, as it relates to us, we try and evaluate every game based on what its needs are and how long we think it'll take. I will tell you in general, though, and I'm 98% confident in this answer, that just about about every dev in the world would love for the window to be like a day or almost not at all. Yeah. Because they hate showing off their stuff in progress. It stresses them out. It's a lot of work to put this stuff together.

And the longer the period is, the more stuff that they're going to have to do because you can't just announce a game X months in advance and then do nothing. You got to put some screenshots out there. You got to show some gameplay. You got to do a trailer. You got to talk about the characters. You got to do whatever. So all of that stuff is more things that get added to their pile on top of this really hard thing of making and shipping a video game.

So in general, devs always like it shorter. I've done campaigns that were literally years and years long and all the way down to what we did for shelter, which was the best one, which is, hey, here's a thing. And you can go download it right now, at least on iPhone, which was awesome and really good. I don't know what we'll do going forward. There's always this bouncing act of a lot of internal things, right? The sales guys working with retailers, setting all this stuff up, working with publishing partners and countries where we don't distribute games. You need time to set all that stuff up and to get the word of mouth out there.

But I would say in general, we felt like, you know, what we did with Fallout 4 was a success. But every game is different and has its own needs. and as far as what other publishers might do, I have no idea. I feel like it comes down to two, like how much do you have to explain, right? Like, fallout four, cool, it's fallout four.

Awesome, great. Whereas like, pray, all right, cool, we're doing something completely different. You need the trailers. You need us to walk you through and explain what the systems are and how this is going to shake out. That's very true.

Mr. Jetton says, how is that new Wolfenstein coming? Colossus. What is it? Colossus. Remember this one? You showed it in your little trailer. I did?

Yeah. it booted up and it went through all the games and that was there. Really? Yeah. It said new Colossus? Weird. Machine games has been hard at work on something, which I can tell you I have played. It is fucking bananas.

And I can't wait to show what it actually is and what they're actually up to. And I'll let you know when. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Kind of Pete says, hello, Pete. I assume Kind of Pete made this account to ask you this question. Okay. Hello, Pete. Can you talk a little bit about the major differences between big titles such as fallout and similar ones like dishonored or prey from a marketing perspective? Big and small only in terms of sales figures, not quality, of course. The short answer to that is there really isn't any.

Like, the, our approach to every game is we have to do the best job possible to put the best foot forward for that product. And that's true regardless of how many sales figures. So, you know, Skyrim shipped with 20 million or whatever the hell it was over the first few months. It's not like we tried extra hard for Skyrim, but this other game over here is only $2 million. It's like, ah, shit, we can just mail that one in. Like, we'll just work on that during, you know, lunch breaks and, and, you know, happy hours and stuff. that the way we're organized, the way my team is organized, that I stand here and talk to Greg,

much like Todd does about the game, and it's sort of like, it ain't me doing it. I did not do the Fallout 4 campaign. I will go on record as saying I didn't do almost the vast majority of Fallout 4. That was Paris and Carlos and Ange and Matt Grandstaff and Tracy and Aaron and Steve Perkins and all these people that I have on my team who spend all this time working on these things and making up cool, fun ideas, the special videos that we did.

That was all like Paris's thing. She sort of pushed that and put together this great thing and it was so cool they ended up being in the game. But the people who were working on these things, like they put everything they have into making the thing that they're working on the best possible because they're not working on fallout. They're not working on Doom or whatever else.

Their whole focus is on, you know, the title that they're assigned to. So we don't really half measure it or say like, well, we'll try 70% because this game's sales are X. Everything that we do is like we got to make it feel like a Bethesda game, which means quality and fun and doing some things that are interesting and unique and really bringing the essence of what the devs are making to the fans beforehand. So they really get a sense of what the game is about. That's something interesting, too, that you talked about a bit yesterday that we didn't touch on here. the fact that your devs, you make, you don't make them like, you have a gun to there. You allow, or you want your devs to be as involved as possible.

In our process? Yeah, absolutely. And I think I use the machine games guys as an example because they had been somewhere else before working with other publishers. And when we worked on the first Wolfenstein, we were talking to them about like the box or the trailers or all of this stuff. And they're like, like, what, what, like, you want us to talk to you about what the boxes?

We're like, yeah, like, we have these ideas and designs. and like, is there something? They're like, yeah, like half the time for other games we worked on. Like, we found out about the box when it got announced online. We were like, oh, they picked a box for us. Like, okay, well, that's actually, that's not what, yeah, that's not what I would have done. But that's part of our process is we want, we want the devs to be involved in the process and to buy into what we're doing and to make sure that everything we're doing fits with

the tone of the vibe of the game we're making because that's really your, the beginning of your interaction with any game. is not when you put the disc in, it's all of the stuff that you do and see around that game leading up to them. The way a prey trailer makes you feel is part of the experience of playing prey because it's creating a tone and a vibe for what your expectations are, which is why I was talking before about we really don't ever do things that are widely, wildly disconnected from the game experience because we think the marketing is part of the game experience, that the website and the label on the disc and what the box looks like all ought to feed into

the same kind of experience that the game itself is providing. You put TLC into it. Yes. A lot. There you go. Space Ghost says, Hey, Pete, as a young professional in entertainment PR myself, film, what advice would you give to people

trying to make the transition into gaming PR slash marketing? What are the most essential characteristics, tools or skills? P.S. Prey looks amazing. Thank you. I get this question a lot. The truth is there's no sort of formulaic, easy answer. Everybody's got a lot of different paths.

And I've only ever worked at Bethesda. So I don't really have the ability to say, like, well, this is the kind of stuff that EA looks at at Activision. Like, how the hell would I know? I've only been at Bethesda. But in general, I think that what we tend to look for are people who are well-rounded. They've been involved in a lot of different things. You know, if you do PR, you didn't just do PR, you worked in a lot of different areas, whether you volunteered for stuff or, you know, took on student assistant positions while you were in college. You were talking about how much you did in college, right? Yeah, like when I was at wake, I was a DJ at the radio station. And I was the manager of the Macintosh labs back when none of us had our own computers and we all went to labs to use them. You hip youngsters that have no idea what that is. Yeah, I was a research assistant for a finder.

finance professor. I was a student assistant for the sports information department. I was an announcer for men's soccer games. I did women's basketball color commentary. Like I did all this different stuff that kind of gave me insight into different areas like public speaking and writing and working with people, whatever it is. And I think the more you can do to make yourself more well-rounded, it's invaluable because, you know, if in a company like mine, those lines are blurred. Just because you're working in PR doesn't mean you don't need to know about community or influencers or branding and you know how to come up with a cohesive branding campaign that includes trailers or videos right we involve everybody in all of that stuff um the other thing i would say is to whatever extent

possible look for opportunities to put yourself in front of developers and publishers that might be um signing up to be a beta tester for something and giving really good beta test notes which by the way 95% of people have no clue what that means. Giving beta test notes does not mean, here's all of my ideas, how to make your game really cool and fun. It's a beta. They're already fucking done with all of that stuff.

What they're looking for is what's broken or not fun. Right. And writing and reproducing it. Like, here's how I can reproduce how to fall through. Not like, you should do this and you should have this feature. Like devs take that stuff and crinkle it up and throw it in the trash can. They're not looking to add features in beta. They're looking for well-written, well-thought-out commentary on what's not working

in their game that can be addressed. So opportunities like that are awesome. It's a great way to get yourself in front of devs. It doesn't matter if it's an indie or a big company or whatever it is. Look for those opportunities to put yourself out there in front of folks and give them a chance to recognize you for what you can do because you'd be amazed how many times people notice you or that matters. And the other thing is to keep in mind that in this day and age, video games, the people

in your audience, like, I bet most of them have grown up by and large with video games just being a thing. Whereas guys like me, like, well, that wasn't really a thing until I was 11 or 12 or whatever. And it's now become a focus of that's what I want to do for a living, which means it's highly competitive, which means you've got to do stuff to set yourself apart. You got to stand out. If you're just going to school and working on a degree to be, whether it's an animator or a marketing person or whatever, if that's all you're bringing to the table, that's simply not good enough. you've got to take a extra step and let your passion and enthusiasm and your desire come through. I want to do two more.

Okay, you ready? Sam NW. What will Bethesda's strategy look like going forward in terms of studio expansion slash acquisition? Are you planning to expand further? Are you satisfied with the number of games that you're currently publishing? We have no, we've never had any concrete plans for expanding. We continue to look for opportunity. of studios we want to work with, but I think we covered this a little bit before, but in,

in general, like, we're just looking for folks that we really want to work with or that have ideas to do games and the experience of proving they can do them that is a good fit for us. Whether or not we acquire them is, by and large, almost irrelevant. You just want to put out good stuff. Yeah. I just want to put out good stuff. And we look for those opportunities to do those kinds of things and to make good stuff. But there's no, like, acquire three companies in three years or whatever. It's not really, because then what you end up doing is just acquiring people

to hit a goddamn number and then you want to look how a better stable is. And then you regret it. So you want to make sure that everything you do is to a level of quality and you're working with people who can do that.

This is a part of the industry aside of it that I'm ignorant about. So is it as simple as a friend of a friend introduces you to somebody at GDC or at Dice, somebody you've met before in the background comes around and just like, hey, well,

and you're shooting the shit about what's going on? Like, well, we have this idea for a game and we're shopping it or is it very, is it very, if I'm an independent developer, is it very, I book a meeting through someone and I show up and I have a PowerPoint. It could be any or all of the above and a lot of flavors in between. There are any number of people that, that some number of us, the main person for this in our group is definitely not me.

It's the guy who actually recruited me to Bethesda. His name is Todd Vaughn. He's our VP of Development. and he's great at a lot of things, including identifying talent, identifying people who have a good fit in terms of their sensibilities and approach and identifying projects and games that are really going to stand out. And so a lot of it is just him keeping up with people and having conversations. And sometimes it's formal. Somebody's going to come in and present a thing. And sometimes it's what you said. Like you bump into somebody at GDC who you haven't seen in a while. But like, hey, by the way,

like we're finishing up a thing. I want to talk to you about an idea that we have. You never know where it's going to come from. Arcane was entirely because Todd kept up with Roth Colantonio over a number of years. He really liked and we really liked and respected some of the stuff they had done like the might and magic the game. It's not heroes. It's the other one. The first person. God damn it.

Okay. You know what I'm talking about. But they did a really, Messiah. Is that what was? Messiah of the Dark. Just go. Just go. The comments allow us.

I'm plowing right through. Someone in their cars will see the NPC and be screaming out this game. Yeah, pulling over the side of the road and yelling at me. It's been a long goddamn day. But they had done a number of things that we really thought were innovative and unique and different. And he kept up with Rob and kept looking for an opportunity when they were, you know, coming off a project and had some Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. Screw you. Stop tweeting with me.

And, you know, he eventually found a spot where. they had time to talk to us about a thing and what we could work on. And that ended up being dishonored. And then in the process of working on dishonored, we started the conversation and they ended up coming in house. But that was just simply him keeping up with the studio that he really liked and we talked about and people played their games and looking for an opportunity. And it worked out great. Awesome. And then final question comes from JRV. He says, or she says, How important do you think new IP are in the current video game market compared to both integrating popular games and reviving old dormant IP? It depends.

We good? No. Explain on that answer. Okay. Mr. Heinz. It depends. And we do a little bit of everything from sort of rebooting things like a Wolfenstein that maybe had some of the sheen off.

I mean, it was this really important first of the first person shooters. had seen better days that Machine Games said, we really want to do that and kind of bring all these things that we do in our games of blending action and shooting and story and character. Let's see. In the case of The Evil Within, it was Shinji wanting to do kind of return to the roots of survival horror and like, well, like we don't have anything that's a fit for that. We should do a new IP. Dishonored was the same thing.

Like Roth and Harvey wanting to do this really grounded first person, immersive power assassin fantasy stuff like yeah i don't have anything that fits that what are we gonna call what do we do actually in that case that was that was a that was a game design that todd vaughan had written up that i swear was on our network like starting in 99 or 2000 when i got to bethsda and sat there for a decade and when he talked to arcane ended up being a different it ended up being different than the way he had written it up but the same idea of like this assassin and he's like i've been looking for you for so long i've been waiting for you for so long So it really just depends.

It depends on who the studio is, what they want to make. Sometimes they specifically say, I want to make that. Like in the case of Quake Champions, it was not just, hey, we want to do something like in the free-to-play first-person space. It was, no, we want to take Quake and bring Quake to, but make it a first-person free-to-play, but stupid fast, you know, fast-paced, e-sports kind of title. So it really just depends on what's the idea and what's the fit for. And to be quite honest, we've done a healthy amount of both over the last five years. I mean, we did Rage with Id. We rebooted Wolf with machine games.

We did new IP with Arcane. We did new IP with Tango. We did the Elder Scrolls with Xenomax online, who took the Elder Scrolls and brought it into this completely different genre than we were used to in online games. It really just depends on what's the right fit. Gotcha. Is that a better answer? That was better than it depends.

That was in other events. Thank you. You did excellent. Thank you. Again. This was really fun. No. Even the second time. Like it's still... It's one of the... I mean, I honestly, I think this might be longer than the first episode. That's surprising. Yeah. But I mean, it's... You're one of those guys that I could talk to forever because you're fascinating. You don't bullshit around. You have answers and you know so much. Thank you for having me.

Oh my God. Well, thank you for coming back. This was a lot of fun. Like I texted you last night. I'm like, this is the worst text. I've had a sentence since kind of when he started. Like, I know.

Yeah. I know. We've always, we always knew one day the sky would fall in that. It's just, of course, it's got to fall and we have an awesome episode with a guest. Other than when we're just sitting around.

Well, I hope this one was at least. This one was good. Kevin was this one. It was better? Oh, wow. Because no, Tim, right? I was going to say Colin, but sure.

Oh, I was going to say that, though. he's going to come stab you. Whatever. Come at me, Colin. Thank you so much. Yeah, absolutely. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for watching

the second ever episode, 106 of the kind of funny games cast. Remember, you can get it early on Patreon, do all that jazz. Follow him on Twitter. He'll tweet back at you unless you've been muted. And if he doesn't tweet back, he probably got muted.

And then no, until next time, it's been our pleasure to serve you.