Bethesda: Single-Player Games Are Here to Stay

The emergence of connected, online experiences that match more than a dozen similarly skilled players into a single lobby has changed the gaming landscape. The wild success of Halo and Call of Duty has seemingly forced every new game under the sun to include a multiplayer component in order to stay relevant, but Bethesda’s marketing vice president, Pete Hines, truly believes that single-player experiences are here to stay.

Major RPGs without any competitive or cooperative features like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Fallout 3 have emerged from this renowned developer, and Destructoid recently sat down with Hines to discuss just how Bethesda has succeeded in places that so many other companies have faltered.

"I’m not sure I know the answer to that," Hines said. "It might be that we were simply set up as a different type of company. Our origins were as a boutique-type developer, not a massive publisher with huge overhead and thousands and thousands of employees. We come at things from a different perspective, having gotten into this as a developer that published its own games."

One of those different angles is excluding most forms of multiplayer from games. Some of the developer’s most well-regarded, commercially successful games are nothing but solo experiences, allowing Hines to argue that single-player games have a place in the industry.

"Single-player games aren't going anywhere. Bethesda Softworks has been making single-player games for all of our 25+ years in the industry. We're still here, we're still making them, and people are still buying them,” he said. “Dishonored was single-player and people really loved it, and it sold well. Skyrim was a complete success. A single-player RPG. There's practically a cottage industry dedicated to talking about how that isn't possible or why that won't succeed.”

Just last year, we gave Dishonored, one of the company’s newest single player-focused IPs, a perfect score. Let’s just say we’d like to believe that a game doesn’t need multiplayer to succeed, too.