Oblivion Horse Armour dev looks back on hated DLC – “We had no idea what we were doing”
Oblivion Horse Armour dev looks back on hated DLC – “We had no idea what we were doing”
Skyrim lead designer Bruce Nesmith looks back on Oblivion's Horse Armour DLC 18 years after the internet revolted against it.
Online games are different because you control the hosting and the service has much higher upkeep. Don't try to apply the same shenanigans to single player games. Also pissed me / pisses me off that they started doing this Borderlands 2+
But then they say,
Despite the massive backlash and more than a decade of memes, Horse Armour DLC’s popularity was proven by the wallets of gamers. While Bethesda was being flamed for releasing the paid content, the numbers don’t lie, and gamers were actually very interested in paying for the DLC
Their main market focus is on whales now. They make it very clear, they see the Horse Armor DLC as a success story.
I don't know how people there are like me, but I have forked over a lot on TES:O that I will no longer ever fork over again, and I regret having fueled their foray into single player. I will not preorder TES6, and I will have to wait for discounts to begin applying to their new franchises. As someone who was deep into TES lore, I will no longer care about TES6's monetization or their attempts to tie into and guide players into TES:O.
But whales... Whales never change.
3“[Horse Armor] must have been [sold] in the millions, it had to be millions,” Nesmith said. “I don’t know the actual number, I probably did at one point, I just no longer remember that. And that was kind of a head shaker for us: you’re all making fun of it and yet you buy it.”
And that right there is the reason why the industry is absolutely saturated with this shit now. If people had just chilled the fuck out when this shit was first introduced, made sure it was an absolute flop from a sales perspective (not only for this one, but for others that were released back then, too), we might be in a better place now.
189I will admit to being one of the people who bought this DLC when it came out. I was very engrossed in the game at that time and felt like $2.50 was trivial enough that I just went for it.
Now, I was uninformed about what the armor did and was disappointed that it was only cosmetic. But I don't remember regretting buying it.
In hindsight, I wish I hadn't bought it. And it's something I wouldn't buy now.
2If people had just chilled the fuck out... we might be in a better place now.
Gamers aren't a bloc, and each person has their own individual game tastes, opinions, and willingness to spend money on trivial junk.
Most gamers are tween Fortnight players or ones who play exclusively mobile games full of ads. They are not people like us. This was inevitable, and nothing would have or will ever change it. Most people just want a pleasant distraction from the horrors of life and don't have any particular principles when it comes to how they spend their money on games.
13I'd argue that part of the problem is, gamer culture has approached everything in the industry from a vein of negativity. "Don't buy this", "Pirate this", "XPublisher is damn evil". Certainly many of those accusations and rejections are valid, but there is now far, far more attention on what sucks than what's good. A developer puts out an awesome singleplayer game they spent 7 years making, and we'll give them $60 but...not much more than that. We'll probably even complain if, due to high budgets, it comes out at $70. Meanwhile, the rest of the world that's curious about entertainment doesn't care much about 30 "Don't" rules and just buys whatever seems interesting when they're bored - because they got their paycheck and want something.
It's reasonable a developer is always finding new ways they can pay their staff. I'd even say many singleplayer games we love were NOT the money-makers we wish they were. Granted, quite often now those $60 are going into paying into shareholders and executive bonuses, and I think that's another valid thing to be negative towards, but once again: If this was an important point to gamers, we could champion studios that grant paid time off and lower their CEO bonuses.
And I'll even go one further: If a common thread is "Studios ask too much of our money for the full game"...we could even turn our attention to minimum wage laws. We certainly should be.
26I think the takeaway here is that these things are not important to gamers. a few of us complain about it online, but clearly we are outnumbered in the market.
15
There will always be some fucking rich kid that will buy every skin no matter how many other people criticize the practice.
9The sad part is that most of the whales aren't actually that rich...
4
We must live in the world we create.
14The only reason i have it was because it came with the goty edition. I wonder how many that accounts for
5
I was working in the industry at the time and people absolutely talked about the implications of microtransactions and how it would result in more expensive games and being nickel and dimed.
Like, I distinctly remember conversations with actual human beings from exactly the horse armor DLC and maybe we didn't think it was going to result in, say the online shooter battle pass formula exactly, but we without ambiguity understood that meaningful in game items, and things like levels / experience would be monetized.
The biggest shocks to me were how patches would be used to reduce the game testing cycles, enabling companies to print incomplete or broken versions of games, requiring day one patches.
It's a disgusting practice now, and it was then too.
78Their mistake was not making it available for only 2 weeks for $40 like Blizzard.
18I encourage everyone to never spend money on blizzard products. They dont even offer quality anymore like they used to.
4
Bethesda had no idea how much backlash the DLC would create
Yeah sure.
Either they're just straight up lying, or they're completely incompetent over at Bethesda.
Sadly, both don't seem very unlikely realities for what that studio turned in to.
16no idea how much backlash
That's not to say they didn't expect backlash, they fully expected some, they simply didn't do a field study to see how bad it was going to be. Actually pretty common in the industry. Thow shit against the wall, see how bad the outcome is, discount that against profit. :)
35plus
“One of the things about Horse Armour that you have to remember is Bethesda, I believe, was the very first company to do downloadable content expansions,” Nesmith told us. “Nobody had done that before for the platforms. We literally pioneered that. And so Bethesda didn’t know what the hell it was doing at the time. We didn’t know!”
17
Drag doesn't like the random out of context quotes that interrupt the article with "spoilers". Drag is already watching, drag doesn't need to be convinced with a trailer! It's as bad as watching Columbo.
-13Bullshit, Bruce Nesmith. You're just a dishonest coward trying to absolve yourself of blame.
Edit: the paid horse armor was extremely controversial among gamers at the time, and plenty of people prophetically warned about what the consequences were going to be. Bethesda damn well knew or should have known exactly what Pandora's box they were opening.
-4Should they have known before the backlash started?
3Yes! They announced the plan before they actually did it; they had plenty of time to realize how pissed off it made everybody.
3