Pete Hines Glazes Bethesda & Starfield's PS5 Launch

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]Okay, we're going to talk about two things in this video. Starfield's release on PS5 and a Pete Hines interview he did with uh Fireside Chat.

[00:00:08]He was like the head of marketing for Bethesda Softworks for a really long time. He clearly doesn't like Microsoft, but at the same time, he really glazed Bethesda too much. But let's start with Starfield real quick. I just want to shout out my second channel where I post quick gaming news videos. You should definitely go subscribe. We're going to go through a series of graphs from Alania Analytics. Starting with this one. This is showing the daily active users for Starfield since the update.

[00:00:34]And I'll admit it's more than I expected. You can see across all three platforms, it's holding about 250 to 275,000 players every day with, in my opinion, a pretty shockingly even split across all three. I don't know where these guys get their numbers, but these have been cited by a lot of different places at this point, so they're pretty trustworthy, I guess. Now, like I said, this is daily active users, not like concurrent player count. So, this isn't really amazing when you consider games like Crimson Desert can hold 250,000 people every day for weeks after launch.

[00:01:07]So, as far as daily active users, this is actually probably really low if you compare it to who Bethesda should be compared to. Like, I bet Fallout 76 even exceeds this. For the next one, we have sales numbers. Apparently, Starfield sold about 140,000 copies in his first week on PlayStation. Now, this graph is comparing it to other Xbox published games, and they're all showing their total count right now, not like their first week after launch counts. We'll get to that. And you just got to ask yourself, is 140,000 on the biggest console platform for a major Bethesda RPG really good? I don't think it's good. And this next graph shows that it's the Bethesda audience that's really showing up for this. 81% of people who play Starfield have played Fallout 4.

[00:01:52]66% for Skyrim actually seems a little bit low to me, but 58% for No Man's Sky.

[00:01:58]It's kind of funny. I feel like Starfield not being on PlayStation for all this time has actually increased No Man's Sky sales. And you know, it actually makes a lot of sense when I say it out loud, but it's just such a foreign concept to me to be excited to play Starfield. This graph shows how each game was doing a week after launch.

[00:02:16]And we'll just put the numbers down here. Starfield's at about 140k. Ninja Gaiden was at 100K. Microsoft's Flight Simulator was at 77K. And The Outer Worlds 2 was at 63K. Now, this is just really funny to me. They're not even doubling a niche flight simulator. And I can't wait for the comments about how it's not niche, but it's it's it's a flight simulator. Got to be a little niche, right? I mean, I also just looked it up and apparently it took them about 4 years to make the flight simulator.

[00:02:43]Starfield took about eight. And I think if you have double the dev time on something, you want more than double the sales, right? Like each ounce of dev time should result in more than an ounce of sales, right? Right. I don't know.

[00:02:55]What's also funny is that OuterWorlds 2 has 63K. It was and is still notoriously $70, but Obsidian pumped that [ __ ] out in like 45 seconds. Starfield released at $50 on PS5 and is the first Bethesda RPG released on PlayStation in 11 years.

[00:03:13]And no, Oblivion remastered does not count. But yeah, I don't think Starfield is doing great. It's obviously doing fine for Bethesda. I'm sure they make a bunch of money off that creation slop. I can't wait to do a video on that. So, now let's talk about the Pete Hines interview. Again, this was done by Fireside Chat. We're not going to go over every question because these guys were yapping a lot, just the important ones. All right, for our first question, they ask, "Obviously, there's some negative aspects of merging with another company, but there must have been some cool stuff as well, right? like was there a moment where you were growing where you were like holy [ __ ] we're here now is there a moment that stands out for you and Pete responds I think the holy [ __ ] moment was actually Skyrim morowind allowed us to stay in business like it was a really big hit but it was a really big hit at a moment that truth be told we were in some trouble we really needed a hit then Oblivion credit to Todd Howard who said I am not just going to turn around and spit out another one of these in 2 years and put it out on the same console he saw an opportunity that the next thing was going to be really pig and he really wanted to embrace that we could be a poster child for what nextg graphics looked and no oblivion was not a poster child for nextg graphics but he went on to say if you remember going from Xbox to Xbox 360 and that jump to high def and what it was like in the moment like is that a real forest or is that the game and that legitimized us we were the consensus game of the year off of Oblivion no one ever mistook a forest in Oblivion for a real forest but yeah Oblivion was game of the year at Spike TV video game awards. Just take this as a sneak peek into some of the pretty crazy stuff Pete is going to say later.

[00:04:50]He went on to say Fallout 3 did a lot for us, but there's also people who love that game and people who have never played it. But that wasn't a thing with Skyrim. Everybody played Skyrim. That was the thing that made us feel like we've arrived. We are legit. You have to be concerned about us if you think you're going to win game of the year.

[00:05:08]You have to take us seriously now. We have broken out role playing games into a whole huge group of people who have never played an RPG before but played Skyrim because it just looked like fun.

[00:05:18]This is just some of that good old Bethesda delusion to me. As far as the major video game award for each year.

[00:05:24]Before it was Spike TV and now it's the Game Awards with Jeff Keelley. Bethesda has won two of them. Oblivion and Skyrim. Since Skyrim, they haven't won [ __ ] So no, Pete. I don't think people have to be concerned about Bethesda if they think they're going to win game of the year. Now, you could say that the previous two major Elder Scrolls releases, four and five, have both won the major game of the year awards. Do you think six is going to keep that streak up? Let me know in the comments cuz I sure [ __ ] don't. I think they're carefully trying to plot out a year where they think that they can be the biggest game. And I don't think they're going to find one cuz that's all it is to Bethesda is a bunch of awards and [ __ ] like that. Once they got a taste of that gold, they couldn't go back. Just sucks for them that they completely forgot what got them there to begin with. He did go on to say the follow-up to that was doing Fallout 4, and that was the first time I said, "Let's stop doing a booth at E3 and do this showcase thing because I think we've earned that right now to say we're going to take an hour and tell the whole world what we're up to." And yeah, I absolutely think that they've earned the right to do E3 showcases. Not that that's a thing anymore. And I think that was a great idea by Pete. It worked out really well with Fallout 4, but the 76 one, eh, could have been better. This will just be a quick one, but the interviewer asks, "I still think Brink was just ahead of its time. If that had come out 5 years later, people would have loved it." And the first part of Pete's response is pretty funny. He says, "Maybe." I mean, honestly, it's pretty high up on my list of like disappointments in terms of what that game could have been, how good the marketing was for that game. I really love the marketing for Brink. And then the game dot dot dot. That's just a really telling statement to me because Pete must have known that the game wasn't all that great, but because it's his job, he still had to do his best to market it. And it just sucks, you know, to see him so blatantly admit that the product wasn't great, but he really loved the marketing. It's just [ __ ] weird, dude. And even at the bottom here, he says like, "It's still good.

[00:07:20]What if we put it out again? Like, how many people would play it? Is there even a point?" The free thing is if we get enough people to play it, would we consider putting dev time in it to address stuff? How about you just put the dev time in it to address stuff because you [ __ ] sold people it? He says we just never got to a point of pulling resources away from new [ __ ] to go back to something that we didn't get right. But you still [ __ ] sold it. So you know you didn't get it right, but you still sold it. Like Brink is free now, but you sold it for $60 for 6 years. He says we could just waste millions of dollars in time and get nothing. Would it really cost you millions of dollars to fix the game?

[00:08:00]Man, I really don't know how much it cost to develop [ __ ] But if we're talking about just going back and addressing like bug fixes and stuff, is this really something that takes millions of dollars after a game is already released? Don't modders fix games all the [ __ ] time for free in their spare time? I just can't stand this mentality that he's pretty much showing here. So, the interviewer goes on to say, "Since you're retired, we'll direct this question to your job at Bethesda. What was the best thing about your job there? The people, anyone specifically you want to shout?" And Pete gives a really long answer, and if you want to read the whole thing, it'll be linked below, but I want to focus on a couple parts. So, Pete says, "I was staying there because this place still needs me. I just hit a point of yes, it needs me. And I am powerless to do what I think needs to be done to run this place properly to protect these people to maintain what we worked so hard to create, which is an incredibly efficient, well-run video game developer and publisher. All right, first of all, we're getting really dramatic here. I mean, shout out to Pete Hines for being there so long, but I I don't think Bethesda needed you. That's a pretty main character kind of thing to say. But that part about Bethesda being incredibly efficient, and he didn't just mean the publisher side, he meant the development side. I mean, I think everybody finds that incredibly funny.

[00:09:17]Pete, just in case we still need to remind anyone, Skyrim came out in 2011.

[00:09:22]Fallout 4 came out in 2015. The weight for Elder Scrolls 6 is about 16 to 17, maybe 18 years. Who knows at this point?

[00:09:30]And the weight for Fallout 5 will be basically the same thing. There is nothing [ __ ] efficient about that, dude. Bethesda Game Studios might be the most inefficient major video game developer in the world. Maybe it's tough to find one that's worse. He goes on to say, "And when I was unable to do what I thought my job should involve in continuing to have that place be, you know, if not the most efficient publisher in the game industry, it was way the [ __ ] up there. And when I couldn't protect it and I saw how it was getting damaged and broken apart and frankly mistreated, abused, whatever word you want to use, I said, I'm not going to sit here and watch this happen right in front of me. And I got to ask, what changed? Bethesda was already a steaming pile before the Microsoft acquisition. Like if anything, when Microsoft got involved, I got the most sliver of hope that they would do something because by that point, Bethesda had already gone down the [ __ ] And since being acquired by Microsoft, as far as I can tell, Bethesda Game Studios has not been touched. So maybe Pete is talking about other studios under Bethesda Softworks or Zenia, whatever you want to say.

[00:10:41]Maybe he's talking about how they were abused and mistreated cuz some of them were. But Todd and the boys have gone unscathed. Pete goes on to say, "I mean, I gave two weeks notice. I was waiting until after Starfield. I knew I was leaving the year before. Every time Todd delayed Starfield, I thought, [ __ ] I'm here another 8 months." And Todd was the only one who knew. It's another reason I love that man. He showed up for me when I was just at my wit's end and got me through that and got me out of there in a way that I still retain my sanity.

[00:11:11]Dude, there's some bad blood between Pete and Microsoft. Some [ __ ] happened there. Why is he being so dramatic? This is more than just like I don't like Microsoft acquiring Bethesda, so I quit.

[00:11:23]Like talk. And it really shows me that Todd is the company man over at Bethesda and Microsoft at this point. He seems calm, cool, and collected. He's getting Pete through it. He's loving his new corporate environment. [ __ ] disgusting. So this next question, the interviewer asked if Todd started as a programmer. And if you want to pause and read that, he gave a huge answer, but I'm really focused on the last part here where Pete says, "Who else out in the world allows you to just stack up one quest after another on the fly while you're just going wherever you want and doing whatever you want? Go try that [ __ ] in Red Dead Redemption 2. And here's a list of games with Bethesda like quest progression where you can just go around and willy-nilly pick up quests while you're on other quests.

[00:12:09]Bethesda Game Studios didn't make any of these games. Now, I will say that Oblivion and Skyrim definitely predate all of these games, but I mean, if you really want to get into it, World of Warcraft was doing this [ __ ] in 2004.

[00:12:21]I'm sure people in the comments can come up with dozens of games that came out before Oblivion that were doing [ __ ] like this. It is just a crazy statement if you ask me. The thing that really makes Bethesda games unique and sets them apart is just how moddable they are. combined with all of the other stuff that these games do as well. And some of these games are also really moddable. The Bethesda package on a whole is unique to them, but every studio has their own unique thing to them. Bethesda is just convinced that they are super special, guys. Also, comparing Bethesda games to Red Dead 2 is [ __ ] hilarious. Here are some things that Red Dead 2 does that Bethesda games could never do.

[00:13:01]cinematics, amazing storytelling, absolute animation mastery, top tier world detail, and Red Dead is basically an immersion simulator. Bethesda could never accomplish just one of these things on this list, much less all of them and so much more in one video game.

[00:13:20]But yeah, thanks for watching. Leave a like if you enjoyed. If you want to buy a mug, they're linked below. Subscribe to my second channel for quick gaming news videos. It's also linked below.

[00:13:27]Thank you to all the doodles on the board that have signed up. and have a good day.