Metro - Pete Hines Fallout 4 Interview

GC: Bethesda is almost unique amongst the big publishers, in that you have a pretty specific style and a relatively narrow range of genres that you deal with. Did that start out as almost coincidence or has that been planned from the start?

PH: I don’t think it’s too much coincidence, just because of where we come from. I mean, our roots… Bethesda was a developer first. I’ve been there 16 years, but before I got there it was a small PC-based developer that ended up publishing its own games. But it was sort of born out of that and grew into something, as a publisher, larger than that. But we still have that same sort of approach and mentality about finding developers that are a good fit for how we view games. We don’t believe in taking a franchise and doing an annual version of it. We’re not looking to publish to some sort of volume, to say, ‘Here’s your 15 titles for 2015!’.

We’re just set-up to do fewer, bigger things. To try and make sure that our games are innovating, whether it’s in open world or survival horror or whatever it is… that we’re doing stuff that other folks wouldn’t do or don’t do. And so far it’s worked pretty well for us. But I don’t really view us any differently now than five or 10 years ago, other than I think we continue to get better at what it is that we ultimately want to do. You learn a lot from the last game and you hope to apply it to the next one you want to do.