Bethesda’s recent release of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered was a huge hit on launch, despite the game’s continued issues since. While the game was frequently leaked prior to its announcement, the game’s success has proven that shadowdrops can be an effective release strategy for the studio.
Speaking at The Golden Joysticks, Bethesda Game Studios director Tom Mustaine confirmed that the developer is actively looking at more shadowdrops in the future. However, they didn’t explain whether or not major releases like The Elder Scrolls VI or Fallout 5 or smaller titles like a remaster.
“We had a real successful shadowdrop with Hi-Fi Rush through Xbox and through Bethesda,” Mustaine said, hinting that the similar release strategy for the latest Elder Scrolls game only occurred due to the success of Tango Gameworks’ action game.
“Todd Howard, the boss man, he’s wanted to shadowdrop things for a long time,” the director continued, “because it’s so great to be able to say, ‘Here’s the thing, get it today.’ It’s very valuable.”
The game developer explained that “we all have short attention spans now”, and that’s key behind simply dropping a game and hoping that it takes off instead of spending months of heavy marketing.
“There’s Grand Theft Auto, for example. I want that today, right? “ he said. “So it is an interesting strategy… I don’t have any ideas of what would be next, but I hope it’s not the last. Personally, I think it was great to own the internet for that day and, you know, give people exactly what they want the moment we talk about it. I’m a fan of that personally, but I’d love to see more people do it.”
While the next Elder Scrolls game, whenever that releases, will likely get a similar marketing push to games like Starfield or Fallout 4, smaller projects will probably be kept for these quick shadowdrop moments.
While not officially confirmed by Bethesda, Fallout 3 Remastered was leaked to be in development at Virtuous in Microsoft FTC documents. While leakers have claimed that the game is too early in development to be properly revealed, it seems to be a likely candidate to follow in the footsteps of Oblivion Remastered.
