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How reasonable and possibly effective is trading historical and faithful customers against hypothetical new customers? This is the question one may ask looking at the latest move from Bethesda on Fallout 4.

Bethesda is probably one of the most famous company in the whole videogame industry. They have scored tremendous successes with The Elder Scrolls (TES) (1) and Fallout Franchises. One of the latest issue, Fallout 4 (2) was received quite mildly but ended up getting decent enough ratings on Steam (about 83% of the total evaluations are positive since release, 77% on the last month). The game is now about 9 year old (it was released in November 2015). Its player base was estimated at around 25 000 players per day, and skyrocketed recently to 187 000 players. Since the first version of the game, players have been widely following the franchise. Rightly so, Bethesda has tried to build upon the franchise. They have partnered with, Arkhane Asylum, one of the most important Role Playing Game (RPG) company to issue a tabletop RPG version.

Then came the big hit: Partnering with Amazon Prime to make it Fallout 4 a TV show. Here comes the first question: is translating Fallout 4 into TV show a good idea for a game editor? Financially speaking, short term, this must be quite positive to Bethesda bank account as Amazon Prime has acquired a license for the franchise. The cost of this license acquisition could not be found but it is likely to be quite significant.

Playerbase and fans are a videogame company key assets: Why annoy them?
 

But one key asset of a videogame company is the player base and fans. It is probably an understatement to say that both were is in majority very skeptical about “The Witcher” or “Halo” TV versions. But, anyway, the player base was multiplied by 5 (26 000 in November 2016 to 103 000 in January 2020 –according to trackers like SteamDB and SteamChart) before the release the 1st season of the Witcher. Later on, a similar, yet smaller trend for the beginning and ending of season 2 was witnessed.

So, come the second question: How good is Bethesda’s strategy to leverage this opportunity on the gaming side? In order to do so they just released an update on 26th April. But, this appears to have been a poor day Fallout 4 Fans. Sadly, in a fashion that is not rare within the industry, it is creating more issues than creating benefits.

A patch that created more troubles than improvements

This update has been promised for 2 years, which is a long time. The declared goal of patch was to attract new players by improving the graph with new gen technology. Waiting 2 years, fans and players could have expected a patch that was praised for its quality, and not its several downfall. It is 14 GO – the size of a small game. And it does, pretty much… nothing. Especially given the amount of stuff that was working fine for 9 years that get destroyed by the patch.

Few minor bugs were corrected, but no one really cared about them. Still, bigger issues remain in the game. Actually, the issue is: it makes all the mods break down. One may see Mods as a way to customize your game as desired. It is often shared with other. The base concept of a mod is that its free, and can almost be considered as a public good. For the players, it means that the mods they are enjoying are now unavailable. It also means that their saved files may meet issues, including and not restricted to not work anymore. Hours of game lost…. Even worse, it caused big projects, like the “New-London mod” (3) to be damaged (if not lost) and assume some more serious delays.

Mods: The heart of single player game

 

Bethesda thought they may take advantage of Mods and Modders and by the way, make money. They invented the Creation Club. The Creation club removes the free aspect of a mod to make it closer to a Fan made DLC(4), allowing Bethesda to make a little bit more money without having to deploy resources in order to make content. And, “by chance”, Mods from the creation club managed to dodge the issues suffered by others free mods with the new patch.

One may think that breaking mods isn’t such a big deal, and that the Creation Club covers this. But mods are probably one of the most important aspect of single player videogames today. These kind of games, do not stay alive in their basic state. They are evolving. Mods are, historically, what allow 15 years old games or more, to stay alive and sometimes even more relevant than more modern titles. They may not bring short term money, but they are what makes people stay, and potentially buy more products in the future. Their role, in player retention and brand fidelity, is key, and that would be underselling it.

Bottomline, this is not about a special patch. It looks to be more about something really strange often going-on in the video game industry: forcing (not just pushing) customers into a new product at any cost. Creative Assembly patched their old titles in order to make their mods unplayable (by rendering the mod managers ineffective at their jobs), so they expected people (ie in this case sometimes really ancients customers) would have to buy their brand new titles. They had to reverse the patch at some point, due to community uproar. Bethesda already pulled this trigger with TES V Skyrim, with several patches through the years doing nothing except fixing minor bugs, forgetting to patch bigger ones, making issues for free mods and saved files, with just the Creation Club dodging this.

Alienating faithful passionate customers that have been here for 20 years in order to possibly get some new customers is hence very risky. This patch destroys the free and hard work of a lot people, and penalize those that have been playing the game by making their often “modded” saved files unplayable . Except if they used content from a member of the “Creation Club”, then here they are fine. Its seems to be a question of customer respect.

Hence, the question on whether reasonable and possibly effective to is to trade historical, faithful and passionate customers against hypothetical new customers remains relevant. Only time will really tell how many new people come and play Fallout. According to data from Steam Chart and SteamDB, since the 11th of April, date of the release of the show, Fallout IV has been going from around 20 000 players to a staggering 187 000 on April 28th. At the date of the May 2nd, there were “only” 105 000 players remaining. On May 6th, this amounted about 63 000 k players. On May 13th, we would be at 48k players. There might be some peaks on the weeks ends, but the more time pass on, the less people are coming back. This follows a trend similar for others games of the series, like The Witcher series with their TV Show (albeit the player count increase was before the series premiere)

It is hard to say how many new players (i.e. actual new paying customers) came back versus how many of the old ones came back and played again a game they once enjoyed. Provided these “new players” are new players, will they stay or is it only a short term fashion effect due to the show, like it kind of was for The Witcher 3? A company’s goal is to generate sales and to make profit. But was it worth sacrificing a lot that was done by the community for the past 9 years and getting your faithful 20 years plus consumers angry? Will they come back, or will they just dig in on their old titles (this phenomenon exists yes) or just leave altogether because enough is enough?

 

Delivering good games and respecting the playerbase:
This remains a key success factor for the industry

 

The strategy seems to be very, very short term oriented and its commercial success challengeable. Frustrating the faithful playerbase (by killing mods) hoping to get new players with a shiny patch seems to be more than risky. I personally doubt these new players will come back for the next opus. I even believe that the playerbase will largely lose faith in Bethesda and may not come back either. They didn’t really come back for Starfield already.

 

As a gamer but and as an avid follower of the video game industry, I believe that delivering good games (not only shiny) and respecting the playerbase will allow the industry to be sustainable on the long term.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Source: Fallout IV
 

(1) Games such as Oblivion and Skyrim

(2) Fallout 76 is actually outside the scope – by virtue of being a multiplayer game, that therefore doesn’t deal with all the mods issue that a single player game is dealing with

(3) New-London mod is a project that remade the game entirely and is overall praised by pretty much everyone. In addition to passionate people time, a lot of cash from donators was also invested to support the project.

(4) Downloadable Content

(5) The player peak at release was 471 000 players for Fallout 4 for only 330 000 players for the brand new title. Looks like an other proof of the limitation for the “new people will come / stay because of the buzz” strategy

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