– Bethesda marketing VP Pete Hines
In a new interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Bethesda marketing VP Pete Hines talks about the future of the company’s foray into mobile games — after the massive boost that surprise top-grossing hit Fallout Shelter gave the company.
Bethesda hadn’t released a mobile game before — but Fallout Shelter rocketed to the top of the iOS charts; it’s still the number 10 top-grossing iOS game weeks after its release, according to App Annie.
“Suffice to say, we’re pretty pleased right now with how well it’s doing… This is not meant to be a Game of War, Clash of Clans, or Boom Beach competitor.”
What’s interesting from the GamesIndustry interview is how the company doesn’t seem to have laid plans around what form that marketing might take: Bethesda might do commercials in the future, Hines said. The talk at the company’s E3 press conference about the game being an experiment and something for the fans seems to be true.
But one thing is clear: Though it may have stayed out for the space for a good, long while compared to its competitors, Bethesda is shaping its mobile strategy now. Upcoming games will not be tie-ins precisely like Fallout Shelter, which bolstered the hype around Fallout 4’s E3 release date announcement. They’ll be carefully considered for the mobile audience, as the quote at the top of this story says.
For Elder Scrolls: Legends, the company’s upcoming trading card game, that will mean taking things slow and building an audience. “Legends is not about how we look after the first day or week or month. It’s about whether we’re on a path to success,” Hines said.
But most important for the traditional game studio is making mobile games that matter to its development teams, and not just chasing the money: “It still has to come from a developer, somebody who’s going to think, ‘This is a thing I can make great and it will be really fun,’ because when you hit those problems, if they don’t believe in it, then the solutions they’re going to come up with are going to suck,” said Hines.
The full interview has more from Hines on the company’s mobile strategy and Fallout Shelter’s success, and you can read it now.