Vice President of Marketing and PR Pete Hines talks to GamesIndustry.biz on why Bethesda wins forever.<blockquote>Q: Does it make it more challenging to convey that from a marketing perspective?
Pete Hines: Well, look at Oblivion. Everybody said 'there's no chance you're going to sell Oblivion into a console audience; it's too big, it's too complicated, it's too much of a PC thing. They won't get it. Console gamers don't like that kind of stuff.' And then they bought it by truckloads, and it was like 'well, there goes that theory. What other theories do you have?' And then they're 'you can't take an old-school PC isometric turn-based role-playing game and turn it into something that's relevant on next-generation consoles.'
So we did Fallout 3, and that won game of the year and sold a gazillion copies. It turns out that people just like good stuff, and if you market it well and you get people into what the game is about people like it. People want to play good stuff, they want to get value for they're paying for these games. So I think we do a pretty good job of delivering on that, making sure that when you buy a game from us that it's gonna be fun and different and unique from what you played last week, last month, last year.
Q: It must pretty heavily affect the budgets though...
Pete Hines: It does. But what affects the budget more than anything is just the nature of making a game on a 360 or a PS3 - you can't afford to have the same number of artists that you had eight years ago when you were making it for the Xbox, because it takes a lot more work, a lot more effort, a lot more time to put that level of detail in. It's more a function of that than how great do you want the game to be, if that makes any sense.</blockquote>
Pete Hines: Well, look at Oblivion. Everybody said 'there's no chance you're going to sell Oblivion into a console audience; it's too big, it's too complicated, it's too much of a PC thing. They won't get it. Console gamers don't like that kind of stuff.' And then they bought it by truckloads, and it was like 'well, there goes that theory. What other theories do you have?' And then they're 'you can't take an old-school PC isometric turn-based role-playing game and turn it into something that's relevant on next-generation consoles.'
So we did Fallout 3, and that won game of the year and sold a gazillion copies. It turns out that people just like good stuff, and if you market it well and you get people into what the game is about people like it. People want to play good stuff, they want to get value for they're paying for these games. So I think we do a pretty good job of delivering on that, making sure that when you buy a game from us that it's gonna be fun and different and unique from what you played last week, last month, last year.
Q: It must pretty heavily affect the budgets though...
Pete Hines: It does. But what affects the budget more than anything is just the nature of making a game on a 360 or a PS3 - you can't afford to have the same number of artists that you had eight years ago when you were making it for the Xbox, because it takes a lot more work, a lot more effort, a lot more time to put that level of detail in. It's more a function of that than how great do you want the game to be, if that makes any sense.</blockquote>
and Busch Gardens 
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