Bethesda Softworks Interview, Part Two

In part two of their conversation with Bethesda Softworks’ Pete Hines, the editors at Edge chat with the vice president of marketing about the risks the company is willing to take, the importance of Metacritic scores, and more. The usual excerpt:

As a company do you guys look at Metacritic scores?

Oh, absolutely.

Do you award bonuses based on them?

Well, we don’t ever talk about financials. But we are certainly keenly aware of Metacritic scores, and really for one reason, which is we have pride in what we do, and if you spend three or four years making something you care what everybody else says, too. The score, however imperfect it is, is still a better metric from outside the company of how you did relative to everybody else than anything else out there. They could just ask me what I think, but then that’s biased, so you take a sample from everybody.

We do go beyond it though, we don’t just look at scores but we also look at what people say, what they think. When you look at Fallout 3 we didn’t just look at the score and say, “Yay, we got good scores and won awards!” We looked what the people said. This is the whole point of Broken Steel (the third DLC instalment): to remove the ending and continue the story and raise the level cap and do all these things that people are saying that they don’t like.