The first thing this week's title reveal for The Elder Scrolls 6 made me think of was a pair of recent big PR beats from another Xbox-owned studio. At BlizzCon in September, Blizzard surprised everyone by announcing Diablo 5 and its shooter reboot of StarCraft. Both were more substantive than Bethesda's one-word-and-a-quote tease, if only a bit.
They included impressive cinematic trailers and interviews with creatives. Diablo 5 even got some plot and game design details. But it was clear that we are a long way from seeing gameplay on either game, and the real shock was the announcement of far-off release dates: spring 2029 for Diablo 5, 2030 for StarCraft.
The reveals stuck out because they flew in the face of years of received wisdom. There was a messy period in the 2000s and early 2010s when big games often found themselves bogged down in development for years after too-early reveals and amid mounting player skepticism. (Diablo 3 is a good example.) These days, the common consensus is to push reveals back as close to launch as possible. And you certainly don't mention a release date until it's less than a year away. 2030 might as well be in the next century.
Nobody knows this better than Bethesda boss Todd Howard, who as recently as March this year admitted that he regrets announcing The Elder Scrolls 6 all the way back in 2018. This was followed by eight years of silence from Bethesda, eight years of griping by the community, and eight years of Howard being asked about it ad nauseam by the press. The current PR orthodoxy would dictate that, after an error such as this, Bethesda should say nothing more until it had something concrete to show: something more concrete than a one-word title, at any rate.
Bethesda does have the excuse of wanting to offer fans something on its 40th anniversary, but it's still a bold, not to say foolhardy, move to offer so little after eight long years of waiting. Adding The Elder Scrolls 6: Sentinel's title reveal to the unusual unveilings of Diablo 5 and StarCraft and Bethesda's candid future roadmap earlier this year, and you have a pattern: Xbox-owned studios getting way out ahead of the marketing plan on the biggest games they have in development. I noted after the BlizzCon reveals that — although Blizzard had other reasons for announcing Diablo 5 in particular — this tactic seems consistent with new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma's desire to ship more games in the group's biggest franchises more often.
Perhaps Blizzard and Bethesda are keen to show their boss they've heard the call to hurry up during a time of great uncertainty and widespread layoffs at Xbox. Or perhaps those public announcements are part of a mandate from Xbox leadership to take every opportunity to thrust the biggest upcoming games into the spotlight, no matter how far off they are, and with disregard for the obvious PR drawbacks. If that's the case, what's the reasoning behind this push?
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