Earlier this week the Creation Club page for Skyrim went live, bringing what Bethesda calls "mini DLC" to Skyrim. This 'mini DLC' is content (EX: armor skins, items) created by Bethesda or a contracted third party that can be bought with real-world money and used in-game.
Bethesda has been hit with plenty of backlash from fans who call the Creation Club a shameless cash grab and just a different way of saying paying mods. Before the backlash for the Creation Club came around, Bethesda was under fire for not having announced Elder Scrolls 6.
It's fair to say that Bethesda has been in the thick of things – at least as far as criticism goes.
In a recent interview with GamesRadar, the VP of PR and marketing at Bethesda, Pete Hines, commented on how Bethesda reacts to community divisiveness. Hines detailed that they won't allow complaints and criticism deter them from their creative endeavors.
Here's what Hines said and the question that prompted it:
GamesRadar: You’re like the George R. R. Martin of games – every time you do something, someone goes "Well, why aren’t you doing this?"
Pete Hines: Unless it’s the exact thing that they’re all asking for, then yeah – you’re going to run into some amount of that. We’re aware of it, but we’re not going to let it define what we do. Ultimately, we’re going to try and do the things that we think are the best for the games that we're making, because that’s, honestly, all I can really control. I’ve tried to help mitigate some of that – I went to Todd [Howard, director of Bethesda Game Studios] a couple of E3s ago and said "Everybody’s going to ask us about The Elder Scrolls 6. You have to help me, you have to help me come out and say what the studio’s path is, and when The Elder Scrolls 6 is coming, to try and manage expectations."
[The development teams] aren't just a vending machine where you press for the soda and they just go back and forth – they want to be able to stretch their legs creatively, or try a new idea, or do something different and not just fall into the same pattern.
I think you see a lot of developers do that, and quite honestly, if we didn’t have folks break from it then you don’t get Horizon: Zero Dawn. Like, how unbelievable is that game? And if [Guerrilla] just stayed on that path for what they were known for, you’d never get that game. Why would you ever think that [the creators of Killzone] would do crazy post-retro; futuristic but retro dinosaur? It might be my favorite game this year, and if they didn’t break from what they had been doing and try something different, you’d never get that. I think that’s true of a lot of studios, right? You don’t get The Last of Us if [Naughty Dog] just kept churning out Uncharted games.
Basically, Bethesda is going to do what they want, despite what fans think they should do.
