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Bethesda Game Studios is a studio that wasn’t particularly known for long development times, at least until the release of Starfield. From Morrowind to Fallout 4, the RPG studio released eight games in thirteen years, but the studio’s output definitely slowed as it revamped its in-house technology to accommodate the scale of Starfield.
Nowadays, Bethesda isn’t the only studio taking years to release single games as budgets inflate and timelines extend, games now need to sell millions to break even. In an interview with VideoGamer, Skyrim lead designer and systems designer of Fallout 4 and Starfield Bruce Nesmith admits that the current state of the game’s industry has become unsustainable.
You need to sell millions to be a success
Nesmith, who left Bethesda in 2021 to write books and craft smaller indie games, explained that the issue with the current state of game development is “simple economics”. Titles with long development cycles need to be a guaranteed success, and the longer development goes on, the more money they need to recoup.
“I see it as unsustainable,” Nesmith said. “I don’t think this is a sustainable model for the industry, and there’s a variety of reasons for it. Simple economics is one. In order to sell a game that you spent six years working on, you have to sell tens of millions of copies. That’s the only way you’re going to recoup your loss. So if it isn’t a big hit, you’re dead.”
Nesmith explained that games of this scale need to be guaranteed successes but, as with anything, admits its “not something you can guarantee”. As the Starfield designer explains: “It’s really, really hard to make a big hit in the video game industry. It just is.”
A technical issue
Another issue with the extended development times of modern games is the rate of which technology evolves. Developing a game for years can not only lead to financial issues, but technical ones as the goalposts move. Every game encounters these issues during their development, but the longer development goes on, the bigger the problem.
“You have to sell tens of millions of copies. That’s the only way you’re going to recoup your loss.”
FALLOUT SYSTEMS DESIGNER BRUCE NESMITH
“Even with the three and four-year development times that I saw with Bethesda, the technology you’re working with day one,” Nesmith said. “When you start building the game, the technology where it stood [by the time] you released it was different enough to cause your problems.
The hardware that a studio is targeting may also change during development. Famously, Bethesda urged Microsoft to add more RAM to the Xbox 360 before the release of Oblivion, which eventually helped the studio create Skyrim. In comparison, the PS3 version of the game suffered horrendously. Just like games, consoles also change during development, and developers sometimes have to guess what hardware they’re targeting.
“Console makers are very, very good about trying to give you heads up, but they can’t give you something that doesn’t exist yet,” we were told. “If the Xbox One isn’t available, even as a dev unit, you’re making your game anyway, and then you get a hold of the dev unit, and, ‘Oh my God, this is how it works. Oh, I’ve got to change everything.’ Imagine that with a six-year, eight-year, ten-year lead cycle.
A loss in efficiency
Finally, Nesmith explained that the ballooning team sizes of some studios isn’t actually resulting in more efficiency. While larger team sizes are essential for some projects, massive teams can also lead to a dramatic increase in budget compared to the increase in efficiency.
“Coordinating a hundred people, driving them all in the same direction to make one amazing game is hard,” Nesmith told VideoGamer. “Doing that with 400 people, 600 people, 1,000 people, you start to get problems you cannot resolve. It just becomes unwieldy. The benefit you get for the extra body starts to go down. If I have 50 people working on a title and then I add 50 more people, I don’t get twice the productivity, you get, maybe, 80% productivity.”
Bethesda is still working on post-launch content for Starfield as well as diving deep into development of The Elder Scrolls 6. While it may be a long time until Fallout 5, or even Starfield 2, the RPG studio will still be creating exciting RPGs years into the future.
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