Bethesda turns to the Dark
Side
One of the first things you learn upon
getting into playing games is that there’s a “rogues gallery” of sorts made up
of publishers that are known to consistently employ shady and thrifty business
practices to try and leech extra money out of your wallet. EA, Ubisoft, Warner
Brothers, Konami, Activision, all of them notorious for their own sinister
reasons. Even big names like Sony and Microsoft have dipped their toes into the
swamp of scumbags, primarily with the respective announcements of the PS3 and Xbox
One.
And with the advent of this year’s E3
plus a year full of clumsy and consumer unfriendly tactics, another publisher
has decided to join the club, that being Bethesda.
It’s sad to see them fall, too.
Bethesda has made a name for themselves in the last decade by creating huge
games that give you more than enough bang for your buck, extremely stellar
reinventions of classic franchises, and heavy support for fan creations like
mods and the like.
So what happened?
Things seemed fine until the launch of
last year’s Doom. That game launched
with the review embargo breaking on the same day as release, which is usually a
sign of a publisher not having faith in their product. Not allowing any reviews
to be released before the game is released to consumers allows these publishers
to earn themselves some free money, without having to worry about potential
consumers being turned off by a potentially negative consensus. An infamous
example of this is when the universally over-hyped No Man’s Sky launched with no reviews from professional outlets to
its name, resulting in a months-long battle as fans desperately tried to get
their money back for a game they felt was far from what was promised in
pre-released material.
So Doom
launched with no reviews to its name, but when the embargo eventually broke
the game was praised nearly unanimously for its graphics, music, breaking of
genre stereotypes and the way it felt like a true successor to the 1993
original. The higher-ups at Bethesda took note and announced that, as of
October of last year, no reviews will be allowed prior to public launch for any of their games. If a game is being
published by Bethesda, the review embargo breaks at midnight on launch day,
exactly when the game goes live on most digital storefronts.
I’ve gone over why this is a problem
before, but for those new to class I feel it’s worth a look again. This is
contributing to the game industry similarly to what I spoke about last week concerning
Middle Earth: Shadow of War and loot
boxes: what I’m now going to be calling the continued “casino-ization” of the
industry. Publishers love it when
gamers throw money at them blindly, without being concerned about randomly
generated content as seen in loot boxes or when you buy a product early without
first looking at reviews, especially if it’s a pre-order long before a game
hits store shelves.
Buying Bethesda games has now become a
gamble not unlike playing the slots at your local casino. Without the
profession critics there to assist you with your purchase on Day 1, your best
hope is to see what random people are saying on sites like Metacritic and hope
and pray you can glean some reasonable criticism from the constant and
unhelpful 10/10s and 0/10s from people who probably haven’t even played the
thing.
Courtesy to Bethesda, they did say
that if reviews are really important to you before making a purchase no one is
stopping you from waiting, but ultimately this rings hollow as Bethesda is an
active participant in pre-order culture. As I found in my “Rush Job” editorial,
both Dishonored 2 and Prey utilized the review policy, and
both of those games had bonuses included if you pre-ordered, ultimately meaning
Bethesda basically said “you don’t need to buy our games on Day 1…but look at
all this cool stuff you get if you do!”
While Bethesda hasn’t suffered a game being received poorly
overall by critics ever since the review policy went into effect (although I’d
argue Prey deserved it), it’s only a
matter of time before they release a bomb. It’s just inevitability. One day
they’ll put out an overall disappointing game, and it’ll be No Man’s Sky all over again.
And of course from that point things
went from bad to worse.
This year at Bethesda’s entirely
unnecessary E3 conference they announced their “Creation Club”, a way for users
to create paid-for mods to be used in Skyrim
and Fallout 4. After abandoning
the project a few years ago because of the backlash it caused from both
supporters and oppressors to the idea, apparently Bethesda is strapped for cash
as it’s now giving you the option to give them even more money for user-created
content.
What, did you really think that
money’s going back to the mod creators? No, no, of course not. While they’ll
surely get some of the revenue, most of the money earned from Creation Club
will inevitably make its way into the pockets of the higher-ups.
I think the biggest issue with
Bethesda is that they’ve gotten too comfortable for their own good. The
monumental success of their recent Fallout
games and Skyrim have definitely
earned them a place in gaming history, they’re making the same mistake that
Sony did when they first announced the PS3 at a ludicrous price and Microsoft
did when they attached all those awful extras nobody wanted when they announced
the Xbox One: they think gamers will follow them blindly because they’re
Bethesda.
But companies need to remember that
even the juggernauts of the industry were dealt huge blows to the chest after
they got a bit too prideful for their own good. While the PS3 eventually found
success after the price thankfully dropped, it got off to such a slow start
that both the Nintendo Wii and the Xbox 360 were still running circles around
it when the console generation came to an end. Conversely, the success of the
360 went to Microsoft’s head, and the Xbox One nearly died right out of the
gates thanks to the proposed inclusion of always-online play and the barring of
used games. Thanks to this, Sony was able to take the lead once again with the
uber-successful PS4, and to this day Microsoft is still trying to bounce back through things like cross-play with PC
and 4K visuals.
The highest seat in the pyramid is
always the comfiest, but that usually means that the one sitting in there will
often be too distracted with the fact they have the seat that they can’t be
smart enough to stop someone from stealing it. This is what happened to Sony in
2006 when they were riding the success of the PlayStation 2, and Microsoft in
2013 as the Xbox 360’s strong life was coming to a close. Bethesda knows
they’ve become a name gamers can trust thanks to the games they put out, but
that doesn’t mean they’re past becoming the next EA or Ubisoft. The
consumer-hostile review policy and ways they’ve been trying to get more money
from their customers feel like something you’d see from gaming’s most dastardly
duo, but no, it’s coming from what was once a respected name in the business.
Honestly, I think a big-name failure
is just what Bethesda needs to get back on track. That’s what forced Sony and
Microsoft to adjust the consoles as needed, and both of them are doing pretty well
for themselves right now. Eventually Bethesda will release a bad game with no
reviews on Day 1, people will buy it, and the backlash just might be enough to
set things right again.
Song of the Week
Violence (Alternate) - Doom
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