A recent interview with Bethesda’s VP revealed many truths about the company’s video games. Bethesda owns some of the biggest franchises in the industry, including Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, and Wolfenstein. However, not all of Bethesda’s games sell well, and DOOM is among these.
In an interview he had with GamesIndustry.biz, the VP of Bethesda, Pete Hines, revealed many details about the company’s success. While Bethesda owns some of the biggest franchises in the industry, some of them did not achieve the easy victory of others. Among their excellent sellers are The Elder Scrolls and Fallout franchises.
Nevertheless, Bethesda’s other games struggled to sell.
“Lots of things don’t sell as well as Fallout and Elder Scrolls.”
Prey, Wolfenstein and The Evil Within are among Bethesda’s struggling franchises. DOOM is also there, but with a minor difference from the other titles. It in fact did sell well, but not as great as the bigger Bethesda franchises, as Pete Hines stated.
“Our belief is that we want to aim for the right goal of what we’re making and what those franchises can do. If you hold up every game as if it’s gotta do what Fallout and Skyrim did, then you’re [not] gonna make many games because very few games will do that. Like, DOOM didn’t do that but DOOM still sold awesome so it’s just about what’s the right size dev team, dev cycle, size of the audience and are we doing a good job of delivering that.”
However, Bethesda seems to be okay with the popularity of their other video games. That is clear when you see them still making more additional titles for franchises like DOOM and Wolfenstein. Especially DOOM has an ongoing trilogy, which is the remake of the original DOOM trilogy. Judging by that, Bethesda values their fans more than the numbers of sold copies, striving to satisfy them by making each game better than the previous one.