this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2023
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I think you might be in a bit of an echo chamber. Oblivion has a much bigger audience.
My big point here is that Bethesda isn't aware of what their fan base enjoys. There are plenty of people who have played their games who are not fans. When I say fan what I'm talking about is the kind of people who play all of their games throughout history. You garner good will with your community by catering to the desires of the fan base itself. that said even if they wanted to do the most money grabbiest thing they could it would still make more sense to start with 3 and work their way toward 5 again. It would give them more games to monotize and would also let them build hype for the games that did penetrate the general audience
I don't think they're interested in gatekeeping which group of their customers are considered "fans", nor do I think it's them that's out of touch. I know Morrowind is the cult classic, but Oblivion just does better numbers.
I'm not really tracking this at all. I never said Morrowind had better numbers and I'm not clear on what you mean by the idea of gatekeeping. I was drawing a distinction between the average person who just buys whatever is popular at the time and the consistent community that has been very vocal over the years
Gatekeeping who is or is not a fan. The community that is vocal about Morrowind is just probably not as large as the one that would buy Oblivion again. Many of their fans are only fans because they started playing Bethesda games with Oblivion. Many of them probably went back and played Morrowind and didn't care for it but stuck with all of those subsequent releases.
That's not at all what I'm saying there. I'm not making a judgment about people and their enjoyment about the experience. I'm talking about a very obvious thing about how communities like this work. Which is simply the idea that there is a spectrum here. Right. There are people who are actively engaged and there are people who are not (and everyone in-between). You're reading too much into the word "fan" here. I could just as easily had called them community members. There's obviously a distinction here. What I'm getting at is that Bethesda is tone deaf to these people on that end of the spectrum despite their years of dedication to the IP. Any connotation about gatekeeping is not something I brought into this conversation. There are clear aspects about people's behavior that anyone can observe and agree on here.
And if we want to bring in people who played Oblivion and tried Morrowind later I'm one of them. Morrowind is clearly a labor of love in so many ways that their later releases just aren't. I like Oblivion it's a good game, but it's not a great game like Morriwind is. Everything that Oblivion has that makes it good Morrowind had and so much more (assuming we ignore things like how they've aged and all that).
I hear what you are saying and I'm not disagreeing with the idea that Oblivion has been more successful from a raw numbers perspective (this is an indisputable fact from any measurable metric). What I'm getting at is that in this pursuit of numbers Bethesda has lost something along the way and they have never really recaptured it. This always happens when you start to appeal to a wider audience
Obviously Bethesda knows what they are doing as a business they wouldn't still be around otherwise