Bethesda may be too big for its own good

Is Bethesda Game Studios getting too big for its own good, making game development more difficult and complex? That seems to be why one former veteran Bethesda game developer thinks.

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ZeniMax Media, and its subsidiary Bethesda Game Studios, have both grown considerably over the years. The billion-dollar success of Skyrim injected tons of cash into the groups, and ongoing live service games like Elder Scrolls Online, Fallout 76, Fallout Shelter, and the new Elder Scrolls Castles sustain the group with consistent multi-million revenues. Starfield, which is hailed as one of Bethesda's biggest passion projects, was funded in part by these money-making endeavors.

This growth has caused issues internally, though. As teams grow, so too does the complexity of the chain of command, leading to conflicts in the sensitive content production pipeline. Games are not made linearly in a factory-like setting, but are often disparate parts mish-mashed together like Play-Doh; it's a messy process filled with lots of revisions. The more people there are working on a creative endeavor, the more difficult it is to have said project actually finished and shipped out.

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That was the case with Starfield, which began its troubled development many years ago. If it weren't for the Microsoft buyout of ZeniMax, which saw first-party teams jumping in to help Starfield's development, the game may not have even shipped in 2023.

Nate Purkeypile, who had been with Bethesda Game Studios for 14 years and worked on big hits like Fallout 3, Skyrim, Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and Starfield, had some interesting things to say about the studio as it continued to grow over the years.

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Each of these games saw Bethesda expand more and more; the successive string of hits (Fallout 3 leading into Skyrim, which was the biggest hit for BGS, then into the popular Fallout 4 and disastrous-at-launch-but-now-successful Fallout 76 live game) allowed the studio to grow over time. This growth was punctuated by the $7.5 billion acquisition from Microsoft which helped supercharge the development of Starfield.

In a recent Reddit post for his new indie game The Axis Unseen, Purkeypile shared his thoughts about working with Bethesda and how things have changed dramatically throughout the last decade and a half.

Purkeypile's reason for leaving is just that there were too many cooks in the kitchen; Starfield had 500 people working on it just internally at Bethesda Game Studios subsidiaries, not including the other teams that were involved. Fallout 3 and Skyrim, on the other hand, had a lot less people involved, with about 65-110 people working on these best-sellers.

Here's what Purkeypile said on why he left Bethesda:

So I know a lot of people have thoughts on Starfield and how it is probably too big, should have been smaller, etc.

I agree with a lot of that and while I enjoyed working at Bethesda a lot when we were about 65-110 people on Fallout 3 and Skyrim, I enjoyed it a lot less as it grew and grew.

I had a lot of fun building spaces a lot of you have probably seen like Diamond City, Blackreach, Little Lamplight, I was lead artist on Point Lookout and Fallout 76 and more.

Starfield was about 500 people or so and with four different companies involved (BGS, BGS Austin, BGS Dallas, BGS Montreal), and that's not including outsourcing. This just wasn't my style. There were so many meetings and it wasn't the way I liked to build games. I like being able to just move fast and build unique things.