Bethesda: Long marketing campaigns are a distraction from game dev

Last year Bethesda Softworks earned a good bit of press attention for formally announcing its hit game Fallout 4 at E3 in June, less than six months before its November release. 

Now, in a recent conversation with PCGamer, Bethesda marketing chief Pete Hines says the company intends to have a similarly succinct hype campaign for its next big Elder Scrolls game and pitched it as a notable boon for the game's development team.

"Anything we want to do from a PR-marketing perspective always has implications on the devs, right?" Hines said. "Whether that’s trying to capture video or trying to put together a demo: it’s an additional ask above and beyond just working on the game."

The notion that marketing-oriented dev tasks like demo creation can both help and hurt your game isn't new, of course; what's interesting here is that a big-budget game company like Bethesda is publicly drawing attention to that fact.

For comparison's sake, Bethesda Game Studios' last big Elder Scrolls game, Skyrim, was formally announced in December of 2010, nearly a year before its release. The formal marketing campaign for Fallout 3 seemed to run just over a year, from the summer of '07 to the fall of '08.