"Bethesda Outline Anti-Consumer Review Policy" by Rock, Paper, Shotgun

PlanHex said:
Aren't Fallout 4 and Skyrim both exclusive to Steam on PC? Like New Vegas was.
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From a quick glance, seems so. Didn't know they had a deal with steam (don't own either of these games).

Anyway, the most thrown around number of total sales (consoles included) seems to be around 20 million units.

During the first day of release, Steam showed over 230,000 people playing Skyrim concurrently.[107] Within two days of the game's launch, 3.4 million physical copies were sold. Of those sales, 59% were for the Xbox 360, 27% for the PS3, and 14% for the PC.[108] In the first week of release, Bethesda stated that 7 million copies of the game had been shipped to retailers worldwide, and that total sales through the following Wednesday were expected to generate an estimated US$450 million.[109][110] By December 16, 2011, this had risen to 10 million copies shipped to retail and around US$620 million.[111] Additionally, Valve stated that it was the fastest selling game to date on their Steam platform.[111] Steam's statistics page showed the client breaking a five million user record by having 5,012,468 users logged in January 2, 2012. Total number of sold copies on the PC platform is difficult to confirm because Valve does not publicly publish digital sales.[112] During this time, Skyrim was the most-played game on Steam by a huge margin, with double the number of players as Team Fortress 2, the second-placed game.[113] In the United Kingdom, Skyrim was the 9th best selling title of 2012.[114] In June 2013, Bethesda announced that over 20 million copies of the game had been sold.[115] Regarding sales on the PC, Todd Howard stated in an interview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun that "Skyrim did better than we've ever done on PC by a large, large number. And that's where the mods are. That feeds the game for a long time."[116] Electronic Entertainment Design and Research, a market research firm, estimates that the game has sold 22.7 million copies worldwide.[117]

I have tried to go into the sources of the 22.7 estimate and found:

We reached out to game industry market research group EEDAR, as well as Bethesda itself, to get some answers. The following sales data comes from EEDAR. Sartori Bernbeck, the company's manager of insights and analytics, explained the methodology they used to arrive at these numbers:


"The sales numbers I provided are an internal estimate built off known numbers we have access to through certain data partners and extrapolating the numbers into the fuller picture utilizing known trends. We have access to a lot of hard numbers, but we aren't allowed to directly share them (as per our partner agreements) so we use them as foundation for total market extrapolations."

Since bethesda themselves have mentioned the 20 million mark, i guess it's a reasonable number. So if the steam owner (i'm not sure what "owner" entails here, but i guess it's a distinction for when games are packaged with hardware, or become free in their lifetime (and skyrim was free for a whole weekend in 2015-04-23), plus the sales) number (which says it is -+80000, so i guess pretty good for this case) is correct, it means PC is at parity with consoles, which is really interesting.
 
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PlanHex said:
Review copies go out to more than just the big-name sites. Plenty of youtubers or smaller sites get review copies.
And if there's one thing you can trust the game journos to do, it's chase the clicks. Even if they all write 10/10 bestgaemofalltime reviews, you can be sure that if reports of it being buggy unfinished shit start to pop up elsewhere, on reddit/youtube/other reviews, they will write articles about it because they gotta get in on that action while it's hot.
Just like what happened with the two examples I mentioned. Plenty of articles about how buggy and shit they were. Of course, in those cases these articles went up some time after release, at least in part because both had some form of day-1 embargo anyway. Link
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Sorry, but I can't (and won't) muster up any sympathy for the "journalists" here - they willingly crawled into bed with the people over whom they claim to be the "watchdogs" and "advocates of the gamers" like some two-dollar streetwalker. If all of a sudden the Toddster and his cronies start treating them like two-dollar whores, well they kind of brought it on themselves.
 
DirtyOldShoe said:
There is a funny quote from the game designer here though.
http://www.p4rgaming.com/zenimax-de...rumor-we-couldnt-have-wasted-that-much-money/
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Wow, that was a weird read.
"It's not a 200 million game, I don't see how it is a 200 million game, c'mon 200 million? How can it be a 200 million game? Where are they get that it is a 200 million game from? It's crazy to think it'd be 200 million game. If it was 200 million game then our fans would be salivating so much they'd mumify. It's not a 200 million game. How would we even do a 200 million game? Clearly it is not a 200 million game."

Now, this may split ya'lls sides but uh, I think he lying and that it is definitely a 200+ million game.

[edit]

Just looked at:
http://www.statisticbrain.com/skyrim-the-elder-scrolls-v-statistics/
Right. Then why was the guy so defensive and say "200 million game" 6 times?
I don't trust statisticsbrain on this.

[edit2]

Oh and: $1,390,000,000 in total revenue.
Again, where the fuck does all of this money go to?
If their budget was 85.000.000 then they'd be able to create 14 fucking ESO's. Where the hell does the profit that Bethesda makes go to? Are they all findom piggy slaves to dominatrix Zenimax or something?
 
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Mr Fish said:
The thing that could lead to as much of an equivalent of another gaming crash for the triple-A scene would be that triple-A publishers/developers blow the budgets out of proportion and have to resort to money scheming tactics like microtransactions, day 1 DLC, on-disk DLC, pre-order bonuses, season passes, pre-order incentives etc in order to even make the kind of profit that they need.
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the crash for western triple-A perhaps, but for indie and eastern developer such as CDPR or Shadow warrior 2 developer? This could be interesting like the rise of wasteland and fallout 1 were inteded to fill blank after the crash in 90s
 
Shardik said:
Sorry, but I can't (and won't) muster up any sympathy for the "journalists" here
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Eh? I wasn't asking you to, my entire point is that this it ends up harming consumers. That matters, even if most of the ones harmed are the kind of people that pre-order shit and enable these practices in the first place.


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Mr Fish said:
Wow, that was a weird read.
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Again, that's a parody site à la The Onion.
 
Mr Fish said:
Oh and: $1,390,000,000 in total revenue.
Again, where the fuck does all of this money go to?
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Revenue is not equal to profit. Profit = revenue - expenses (taxes, rent, salaries, debt, marketing etc.), depending on their operational costs profit could be a very big, or a very small number (for example AMD just had a quarterly revenue of 1.3 billion and a profit of 27 million). I'd reckon their profits are pretty good, but nowhere near the revenue number. Also, this revenue should be divided by 4 years, as that's the time it took to get it.

The profits then can go to shareholders, investing in new projects, buying other companies etc.
 
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Mr Fish said:
Might be a little derailing but what happened to Bethesda around the point of Fallout 4? Before then one could argue that they wanted to do things right by the fans and that they wanted to produce games just that they had poor management and prioritized the wrong way. But with Fallout 4 it's like they've been hit with a magic retard stick.

Pre-Fallout 4: Skyrim mods can now be sold on Steam! Except we'll take most of the money cause fuck you. Oh that didn't work out? Aw...

Fallout 4 - Let's completely ruin the game and not even pretend to give a shit about anything anymore. Let's just copy whatever else is popular out there because we are creatively bancrupt. And let's even halfass it so that the crap we 'do' produce isn't even good in any way. But before we release it:

Pre-order - Let's allow people to pre-order the game right after its official announcement cause people hyped yo! Let's coax the dullards into giving us more cheese! And while we're at it:

Pre-order season pass - Let's put out a season pass out of all things because that's necessary as fuck yo. And let's allow the "fans" pre-order it too so that they can give us even MORE cashmoney whoop whoop! But hey... >_> This game kind of uh... Sucks. *Pete Hines walks in* Yeah I don't wanna sit through our dialogue it fucking sucks. Yeah... So let's uh...:

Censoring Information - Let's show as little of the game as possible cause, well... "But what about the big gaming events when we have to show the gameplay" Euuh... We'll.. We'll confiscate their camera devices so that no information is leaked out!

Season Pass - Well, we're glad you're enjoying the game so what we're going to do is that we're going to hike the price up because we plan on making more DLC's!

DLC's - What the hell are we gonna do? Let's just take base assets that modders already unlocked for the settlement crafting and sell those to players. Brilliant! Oh and writing quests is difficult so let's just steal a modders quest.

Forums - Fuck the old forums, we need a mobile friendly look so let's start up Bethesda.net.

Bethesda.net mods - Oh gee, I guess fans are taking other people's mods and uploading them without their permission so that they can be available on the consoles. Whoopsie!

Pete Hines - Not interested in talking about [insert topic of the day here] in a game with talking mutants and ghouls.

Skyrim re-release - We need more money... Let's just repackage Skyrim and sell it for full price with mod support.

Playstation fuckery - Except for Playstation, they're kind of unreasonable so let's just allow esp's on that version.

And now this thing about review copies.
I mean, what happened?
Bethesda weren't necessarily 'bad', just a bit incompetent but the future for them wasn't grim or anything. And after the skyrim paid mods on Steam they turned full retard.

I don't get this at all.
I love it cause I get to shit on Bethesda even more.
But I don't understand why Bethesda seems to 'want' to fuck themselves over.
Or are they just trying to see how far they can push people without going overboard?
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You forgot about Oblivion's Horse Armor, Bethesda's dickery to Obsidian in the Fallout New Vegas bonus fiasco, Fallout Shelter's ingame real money store (which already net them millions of dollars of profit). There are probably more junk, I just have a bad memory :irked:.
 
AskWazzup said:
Revenue is not equal to profit. Profit = revenue - expenses (taxes, rent, salaries, debt, marketing etc.), depending on their operational costs profit could be a very big, or a very small number (for example AMD just had a quarterly revenue of 1.3 billion and a profit of 27 million). I'd reckon their profits are pretty good, but nowhere near the revenue number. Also, this revenue should be divided by 4 years, as that's the time it took to get it.

The profits then can go to shareholders, investing in new projects, buying other companies etc.
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So are Bethesda just screwed then? No matter how much money they make they will always barely have the amount they need to take a risk and for that reason they are playing it safe to a paranoid extent?

Risewild said:
You forgot about Oblivion's Horse Armor, Bethesda's dickery to Obsidian in the Fallout New Vegas bonus fiasco, Fallout Shelter's ingame real money store (which already net them millions of dollars of profit). There are probably more junk, I just have a bad memory :irked:.
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Horse Armor was ages ago and I don't really care much for it. It wasn't misleading or anything, it was up front and honest about what it was and this was at a time when downloadable content was pretty new so they wanted to test the waters, see what worked and what didn't. I've never thought much about Horse Armor, it was an experiment at a time when experimentation was key.

Bethesda fucking over Obsidian with the whole FNV bonus thing was indeed shitty but I'm talking about Bethesda suddenly turning completely bonkers with almost anything that they do. They screwed over Obsidian. That's bad, but how long did it take for their next big bad thing to come? Skyrim's promises? I guess one could argue that. But then again it could be argued that Bethesda were simply overambitious when it came to affecting the economy and destroying buildings and shit. So while I think it should be taken into consideration when talking about ALL of Bethesda's fuck ups I am talking about a specific point in time when they shifted from occasionally(?) doing something bad to just straight up fucking up every time they do something.

Fallout Shelter's microtransactions are fine. The game is honest about what it is and unlike other mobile games out there you can play Fallout Shelter without paying a single penny. So I don't see any real problem with this. If people 'want' to use microtransactions then I don't necessarily have a problem with it. Especially not when it is for a mobile app who's survival relies on 'some' kind of revenue and since paying for a game before playing it is a thing of the past on the mobile market; What are they supposed to do?

Bethesda has done shitty things in the past, but what I'm talking about is Bethesda suddenly going full retard. There is a specific point in time when this happens and I'd pin it down to the whole steam paid mods fiasco. After that Bethesda's been making shitty decisions around every turn.
 
PlanHex said:
Eh? I wasn't asking you to, my entire point is that this it ends up harming consumers. That matters, even if most of the ones harmed are the kind of people that pre-order shit and enable these practices in the first place.
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And my point is, though I'm probably not making it well at all, is that the harming consumers bridge was crossed (and burned) a long time ago when the "journalists" abandoned any pretense of being on the consumer's side and instead chose to become extensions of the studios' marketing departments.

And now, since the pre-order business and all the other shitty shenanigans the studios get away with have become "accepted practice", the studios don't need the "journalists" any more, and they're becoming less and less shy about letting them know it.

I'd like to think that the "journalists" would recognize this and actually start doing what they claim they're doing (giving gamers honest opinions to help guide their buying decisions), or better yet, that gamers decide they've had enough of this shit and voice their opinions in the only language the studios understand (by snapping their checkbooks shut). I don't see either of these happening any time soon, if ever.
 
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Shardik said:
And my point is, though I'm probably not making it well at all, is that the harming consumers bridge was crossed (and burned) a long time ago when the "journalists" abandoned any pretense of being on the consumer's side and instead chose to become extensions of the studios' PR departments.

And now, since the pre-order business and all the other shitty shenanigans the studios get away with have become "accepted practice", the studios don't need the "journalists" any more, and they're becoming less and less shy about letting them know it.

I'd like to think that the "journalists" would recognize this and actually start doing what they claim they're doing (giving gamers honest opinions to help guide their buying decisions), or better yet, that gamers decide they've had enough of this shit and voice their opinions in the only language the studios understand (by snapping their checkbooks shut). I don't see either of these happening any time soon, if ever.
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I agree with you, but, there are some that do the right thing. The Bethesda issue as a side note and some reviewers feeding off of scraps. But it is putting all reviewers in the category of scumbag, granted, many of them are, but there are some decent ones still. So, for the shitty ones, I agree, but I can't apply the same rules to everyone of them, and removing the majority of shit reviewers from the opinion, it isn't fair for anyone.
 
Shardik said:
And my point is, though I'm probably not making it well at all, is that the harming consumers bridge was crossed (and burned) a long time ago when the "journalists" abandoned any pretense of being on the consumer's side and instead chose to become extensions of the studios' PR departments.
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Whether or not the journos are shills is irrelevant. We don't gain anything from their loss of early access and if there's even a single outlet or journalist out there that isn't jacking off the PR departments, consumers only stand to lose from this.

I'm just gonna go ahead and quote something I wrote elsewhere:
To break it down, day-1 review embargos have the following possible positive outcomes for consumers:
  • Schadenfreude, get to laugh in the journos faces over them losing early access.
  • Extremely small chance that maybe idiots would stop pre-ordering shitty games and maybe serve as a wake-up call to devs/publishers, but we all know they won't because they're fucking idiots.
And the following possible negatives outcomes for consumers:
  • No warning that a game like No Man's Sky had misleading marketing and the designers made a boring piece of shit.
  • No warning that a game that might actually have decent/good/great design is a buggy mess.
  • Reviews will get rushed out the door and be even fucking worse than the shill shit we get now. And yes, they can be even worse.
  • Devs/publishers can release complete dogshit and still make tons of money from the pre-order idiots, so games get even fucking worse than the shit we get now because they funnel the money into marketing instead.
Even if you never buy big releases or look at reviews, you can be affected regardless. Smaller titles can be affected by the changing culture around the large titles too, eroding the quality of everything in the industry. The only way I see a positive other than simple schadenfreude coming from all this is if the entire market crashed and started over, which I think is pretty unlikely. Meanwhile, the negative effects range from likely to almost guaranteed.
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Mr Fish said:
So are Bethesda just screwed then? No matter how much money they make they will always barely have the amount they need to take a risk and for that reason they are playing it safe to a paranoid extent?
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I was not implying that their current profits have anything to do with their game development decisions, but that people sometimes confuse revenue with profits and think that there are huge piles of money lying around the place. Even if they have very good profit margins, they probably spend it on growing their business (more developers, more game ip's etc) and of course some of that money probably goes to financing the sex slave mansions of the shareholders, but probably not as much as some people think.
 
Mr Fish said:
So are Bethesda just screwed then? No matter how much money they make they will always barely have the amount they need to take a risk and for that reason they are playing it safe to a paranoid extent?
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I think that's the wrong qustion.

I think you should ask, why is Mc Donalds always making cheap and mediocre burgers. And when you look at Beth today, they are to RPGs, what Tacco Bell is to Mexican food.
 
Crni Vuk said:
I think you should ask, why is Mc Donalds always making cheap and mediocre burgers. And when you look at Beth today, they are to RPGs, what Tacco Bell is to Mexican food.
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Difference is with Mexican food there's an abundance of good shit. With RPGs you have to properly look. And there's not an entire country filled to the brim with them ;(

It's a shame gaming has been reduced to this. I genuinely think we should suicide bomb Toddie- not for ourselves, but for the greater good.
The greater good
 
Crni Vuk said:
I think that's the wrong qustion.

I think you should ask, why is Mc Donalds always making cheap and mediocre burgers. And when you look at Beth today, they are to RPGs, what Taco Bell is to Mexican food.
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McDonalds makes those crappy burgers because there's a huge market for them, but they're not telling you that what they're selling you is a five course gourmet meal. Bethesda is.
 
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