I remember laughing at people buying horse armor when Oblivion came out, and now I’m glued to the screen watching streamers drop $300 on gacha game pulls
I remember laughing at people buying horse armour. Now I’m just sad at the state of everything.
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Microsoft didn’t own Bethesda back then, am I missing something?
DLC was originally released for Xbox 360, so Microsoft might have some influence here, though I wouldn’t underestimate the greediness of Bethesda.
You aren’t but I think OP might be
Microsoft was massive back then too and interacted with a lot of various studios. They notoriously forced Valve to charge money for their free Left 4 Dead dlc because they thought it would set a bad precedent.
So I wouldn’t be surprised if some Microsoft employee inspired the horse armor dlc.
ZeniMax was doing dumb shit long before Microsoft. Bethesda has had a clueless culture for more than a decade. 2019’s disastrous performance across almost all verticals not only showed how clueless both BGS and ZeniMax were, it also paved the way for the Microsoft acquisition so Altman could get his bag. Todd Howard and Pete Hines let their original successes go to their heads and forgot the market changes.
True, but it’s not just clueless. It’s malicious too.
I’ll never forget how they originally introduced paid modding through Steam, then apologized when people got mad, only to bring it back with the Creation Club years later when the anger died down.
They literally only apologized so they could calm people down and do it again later - it was a flat out lie. They tried to justify it with Pete Hynes arguing with people on Twitter, swearing up and down that CC content were “mini-dlcs”, not mods, so they actually upheld their promise. It was a bs excuse.
But at least they had an excuse. Recently they straight up allowed paid mods on their store, without excuses, dropping the mask entirely. Proving once and for all that their apology meant nothing and that they’d monetize the modding scene no matter what.
And let’s not forget Fallout 76 and all the shady shit surrounding that…
Left 4 Dead dlc
L4D2?
No
Perhaps that person stayed with Bethesda long enough to be an M$ employee?
Maybe it’s supposed to be the catalyst to Bethesda’s downfall, allowing M$ to buy it on the cheap?
I believe, there was some special overlay on the XBOX to allow buying it directly ingame. Maybe Microsoft was involved there?
I remember getting Rock Band songs for $1.99. The old ones even went down to $0.99 for a few years.
Now, they’re about $3.50 and they’ve stopped releasing new ones.
“Horse armor is not bad. I think horse armor is fine. The price point, at the time, was the issue. We felt, it’s probably worth this,” he said. “I won’t say who at Microsoft said, ‘Well, that’s less than we sell a theme for; a wallpaper is more than that. You should charge this; you can always lower it.’ We were like, ‘Okay!’”
Also it’s weird to me that Bethesda gets crap for their DLC’s. Oblivion’s horse armor was bad, but it wasn’t the worst or the first. Heck, Morrowind had expansions. MapleStory is pretty widely cited as the earliest form of micros transactions. And most of Bethesda’s DLC’s have been great- all 3 of Skyrim’s were ton of content relatively cheap.
I guess that’s the price of popularity?
Expansions are really not the same as “micro transactions” (now very much macro transactions). Expansions were typically content filled and had a fair price point, regardless if they shipped boxed on a CD or were packed into a digital download. Now we pay the price for a full sized expansion for a single cosmetic in some games.
Skyrim has plenty more than 3 DLC. Or do you mean to tell me anniversary edition and special edition are the same? Is Creation Club something you never heard of? I’m jealous
Well… Yes pretty much. I don’t count Creation Club items because they weren’t made by Bethesda.
I don’t turn them on. As far as I know you can find free alternatives for most of what is in the creation club- you’re just paying for to support the independent creators, the convenience, and I suppose the service of Bethesda filtering out some of the worst chaff of the mod scene.
Similarly, I don’t count the other big fixes and upgrades in the Special Edition or Anniversary edition as DLC. Bethesda was rolling out patches for the original game before then, and visual upgrades are more in line with what I would call mods/remaster/remake than DLC.
I think Dawnguard, Dragonborn, and Hearthfire are all very good deals and I wouldn’t mind if games went back to that business model. I didn’t really like Serana’s personality and that’s really the only reason I didn’t like Dawnguard as much as Dragonborn and Hearthfire.
Picard, my friend. I don’t know history well enough to know if MSFT was involved or not based on our colleagues comments below but I most certainly agree that the horse armor was a reckoning, and dawn of a depressingly fraught new era.
And to think we laughed at it then.
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