Bethesda's Pete Hines

I thought it was great, but there's no one approach that works for all games. Every game has got to be different in terms of what works well for you, what fits within your existing game. One of the things I like about the stuff that we do is that it does fit within your existing game, which is not something that a lot of games offer. It's like, here, you can play this thing but it's completely separate to what you're doing, whereas our stuff is, you can keep playing the game as you bought it, and by the way there's all this stuff out here now in this direction which adds to it.

I would say there's a lot of truth in that. I don't think anybody has nailed the exact answer yet. I think we continue to try to put a lot of value in our games to make people want to buy it and hold onto it, to limit that second-hand market, because if fewer people want to sell it because they want to hold onto it then there's fewer copies for other people to buy. We saw that with Fallout 3 where people didn't sell their copies, because they wanted to play the DLC.

I don't know if it's something we think on quite that hard. I also think because it's not quite clear what works and what doesn't that it's fuzzy anyway. If everybody was doing X and we weren't, it would be much more like, "Why have you clearly chosen not to do something that's working well for everybody else?" This is a case where there's just no real clear successes - maybe a few clear failures, but it's almost sort of degrees of it here and there, and I just don't think - as an industry much less as a company - it's been pinpointed that one thing is exactly what you should do.

No.

That's not where our interests lie. That's not what we're known for and it's not the kind of stuff we've traditionally done. I think we're pretty self-aware in terms of who we are and what kind of games we make, and we want to keep trying to make those games bigger and better, and not go off and do something that is completely different that we don't have a lot of expertise and knowledge of.

I guess I would put it this way: I want to make the kind of games that somebody who likes Rage would want to play, and who likes Skyrim would want to play, and there's a much clearer path from the guy who likes Rage is also probably going to like Skyrim also probably likes Prey 2 also probably likes Dishonored, or at least there's a much bigger chance of moving an audience from one to the next.

Well, you also have to look at the fact we're not EA, right? We haven't been a company that's put out 40, 50, 60, 70 games a year and is now doing that many games of different shapes and sizes.

No, never, I have zero interest. It's not what our company was created to do, it's not what we aspire to do. We want to focus on three or four big releases a year. Games that when they come out and you're like, "I can't wait to play that." Skyrim's coming out - that's going to be awesome. When Rage is coming out, people are like, "I need a new first-person shooter, something that makes my Xbox look awesome on my big-screen TV - I'm getting that game."

Yeah. You know, I have an iPhone in my pocket and I have a hundred games on there and they're great, by really talented companies, but that doesn't mean we should be the ones trying to be making those, or competing in that space, or going on Facebook.

We had the same thing a couple of years ago with the DS and everybody running after the DS and creating social games and games for girls, and now it's shifted from, "Oh, we're going to put out lots of stuff for the DS or the PSP," now it's Facebook and social gaming and iPhone. And maybe that's the one that catches on and maybe not, but we know who we are, we know what we do well, we know what our audience likes, and we want to make the kind of games we want to play for the kind of experiences we like.