Pete Hines on The Elder Scrolls Online Console Delay

As part of a longer interview concerning Bethesda’s publishing output, Pete Hines, VP of PR and Marketing at Bethesda Softworks, has commented on The Elder Scrolls Online’s console versions delay. Here’s an excerpt where he elaborates on the reasons that convinced them a delay was the right decision:

The delay was put down to “a series of unique problems” regarding integrating your systems to the console platforms. Are you able to say anything more about that at this point?

No. I mean, yes, I could but it doesn’t really matter. At the end of the day, it’s simply what we said in our statement which was that it’s about taking stuff that we know that works on the PC, but when you take that exact same system and you go to a console manufacturer, fundamentally the way it works under their architecture is different than the way that we do it.

That’s quite surprising for Xbox considering it’s connection to Windows and PC architecture.

It is and it isn’t, because it’s not an open system, it’s a closed system. It’s not just an ESO thing – they have rules and regulations that govern all games, if you’re going to do something it has to work a certain way. It doesn’t matter the way that we want to do it – it has to fit their requirements.

I’ll give you an easy example; payments. When we do stuff on PC, we manage it ourselves, it goes through our store, we manage the whole thing. When it goes through somebody else, that someone is doing all of that; taking your money, charging your PayPal, and then transferring that information to us. This is just inherently a different process than the one that we have, where it’s our store and we just have to make sure our system works. It’s the same thing on PSN – you have to just make sure that all of that stuff communicates. When you start adding up the pile of things and everything that we learned from launch, it was clear that we needed to take the time to do this right, because it has massive ramifications if it doesn’t work right for the consumer experience.