“It’s rare to have franchises like the ones we have and to have people joking about “when is Skyrim 2 coming out?” says Hines. “The reason they say that is because generally speaking that’s what you’d be getting with another publisher in charge. They’d be spitting out a Skyrim 2 the year after or two years later. That’s just not how we view it. We’re not the sort of publisher that focusses on 'what’s our 25 titles for 2015'.
"We do smaller stuff, we don’t publish to scale, we try to publish to quality. Make sure everything we do is noteworthy. Our approach to that hasn’t differed. Here and there we might change our approach to how it’s presented but we’ve still stuck to who we are.”
And Bethesda are a publisher that certainly has a certain ‘type’ of game, focussing on adult themes and often oodles of blood. The presentation for Doom at Bethesda’s press conference came under fire somewhat for its relentless brutality. “We make mature games. We make games for grown-ups. Or at least 17 and up,” say Hines. “That is our target audience for sure.
"If you look at what we have… even BattleCry, online free-to-play but visceral, bloody, decapitations, dismemberment. We know who our audience is and we haven’t wavered from that. We make games for an older audience because that’s what our devs know. They make the games they want to play.”
