It’s always tough to see the credits roll from games that easily sucked you in. You’ve completed all the missions, uncovered the secrets, and taken in the narrative journey from start to finish. Fortunately, for some of those games, the developers offer expansions to help keep you entertained in these carefully crafted worlds. But those expansions seem to be few and far between these days. One Bethesda veteran is offering some insight into why that is the case.
Speaking to Videogamer, former Bethesda developer Bruce Nesmith brought up the topic of expansions. In the case of Bethesda, Bruce noted that players typically stick around long after reaching the credits. As a result, there is time for developers to craft new expansions and release them into the marketplace. However, Bruce says that most players move on from a game after about six months, which doesn’t necessarily give a team the time to pull out an expansion.
It just takes an awful lot of effort [to make an expansion]. To create the Shivering Isles, that was many, many months. And by that time, who’s playing the game? Well, in the case of Skyrim, everybody. Bethesda games, not uniquely, are in a very, very select company of games that have a long play cycle.
There’s a lot of games out there that after six months, the audience has moved on to another game. And that company did amazingly well for those six months, they sold a ton of those games, very well received. Everyone’s happy, but they moved on to something else, whatever that something else may be. – Bruce Nesmith
But there’s more to the exodus of players leaving a game after spending half of a year going through it. The size of a studio is also critical. Again, take, for example, Bethesda, as it’s quite a behemoth. Not only do they sell enough units to warrant the ability to make expansions, along with players sticking around with the game to give teams time to make the expansion, but they also have a large team. There’s more going on behind the scenes than just working on the expansion.
Staff could be split between multiple projects rather than pouring all the resources into an expansion release that will only be picked up by a small portion of adopters of the base game. While expansions might not be as bountiful these days, it does look like there are still some games that will see new content brought out into the mix.
