Bethesda’s first E3 conference could be its last

Skyrim developer Bethesda made a thumping E3 press conference debut this year, but that may be the last time we see the company on the LA stage.

I don’t know if we’ll do one next year. I don’t know if we’ll do one again,” marketing boss Pete Hines told The Telegraph. This year felt like the right time to do this kind of thing. It felt like more than we could accomplish in a booth.

The company used its showcase to debut Dishonored 2, Dishonored Definitive Edition, Fallout Shelter and The Elder Scrolls Legends, as well as detailing Fallout 4, Doom and Battlecry.

But as Hines openly admits, Bethesda releases games at a slower rate than many of its peers, so having the content needed to fill a presentation annually seems unlikely.

It’s rare to have franchises like the ones we have and to have people joking about ‘when is Skyrim 2 coming out?’,” he added. 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.”