Skyrim Lead on the death of video game expansions: “after six months, the audience has moved on”

Since the release of Morrowind in 2001, Bethesda Game Studios games have always been supported with sizable expansions after launch. Just like the days of old, the studio’s latest release, Starfield, has just released its first expansion in the form of Shattered Space. However, Bethesda is one of a few studios still releasing expansions in the modern era.

In an interview with VideoGamer, decades-long Bethesda veteran, Skyrim lead and Starfield systems designer Bruce Nesmith explained the reasoning behind the death of expansions in recent years. While some major titles do receive expansions, or DLC missions, the audience doesn’t stick around long enough to make huge post-launch support possible.

Why don’t games have expansions anymore?

Tying into a past discussion about the unsustainable nature of games development, Nesmith explained that the fast-paced nature of the market means that audiences for huge expansions are near non-existent. Outside of huge successes—such as Skyrim or Fallout—expansions just aren’t feasible for a majority of games.

“First of all, it’s a market within a market,” the Skyrim lead said. “So if your game sells, just random figures, 10 million copies, you are not going to sell 10 million DLCs. You just aren’t; you’re going to sell a subset of that. So, if your game is not some behemoth like Skyrim, the amount of sales you’re going to get from your DLC may not justify the development cost of it.”

Nesmith explained that sometimes it can be the opposite as great DLC expansions can drive sales of the base game. However, in a rapidly moving market, this is a much harder bet to land, and developers have to move extremely fast to capitalize on DLC.

“Few games that can legitimately afford or benefit from large DLC releases”

BETHESDA VETERAN BRUCE NESMITH

“It just takes an awful lot of effort [to make an expansion],” Nesmith said. “To create the Shivering Isles, that was many, many months. And by that time, who’s playing the game? Well, in the case of Skyrim, everybody. Bethesda games, not uniquely, are in a very, very select company of games that have a long play cycle.

“There’s a lot of games out there that after six months, the audience has moved on to another game. And that company did amazingly well for those six months, they sold a ton of those games, very well received. Everyone’s happy, but they moved on to something else, whatever that something else may be.”

The expansion isn’t the focus

Nesmith explained that there’s “few games that can legitimately afford or benefit from large DLC releases”, and those who can are aren’t just working on the expansion. In the case of Bethesda, the studio is currently working on a handful of projects: Fallout 76 content, Starfield updates, The Elder Scrolls 6, and likely very early pre-production of its next title. There’s a revolving door of content only possible due to the studio’s size, and its popularity.

“[Bethesda] games have long tails, that’s still the bigger draw for [expansions],” Nesmith said. “But when Bethesda moves on to DLC, what happens is the vast majority of the programming staff starts working on the new game, because usually DLC doesn’t have a lot of programming needs.”

While flying dragons and house building in Skyrim expansions required a healthy team of coders, the expansions were a godsend for art and design teams that didn’t have much to do as engineers worked on getting the technology ready for Fallout 4.

“Design in particular, there’s not a lot of hard work you can do early on. All you can really do is paper designs because there’s no code to support you yet. Same with the art to some degree. You know, the new art tools haven’t been built yet, and the art decisions need to be made. So it’s a good thing to have that staff have something to work on that’s meaningful and productive. So for Bethesda in particular, at least, it paid dividends to be able to do that.”

With The Elder Scrolls 6 still in development for Xbox Series and PC, Bethesda will likely bring back expansions yet again for its massive RPG. While the game won’t return to “fiddly character sheets”, it seems the age-old RPG expansion is still safe in Bethesda’s hands.