In a brutal and damning section of a wider interview, ex-Bethesda boss Pete Hines has put Microsoft on blast, without specifically mentioning the Redmond firm by name.
As part of a chat with journalist Kirk McKeand, he implied his former employees are not part of something “authentic” or “genuine”, and it “shouldn’t be a surprise”.
Hines worked his way up the ranks at Bethesda as part of a 24-year tenure, but he departed shortly prior to the release of Starfield in 2023.
The publisher was, of course, purchased by Microsoft for $7.5 billion as part of an unprecedented – and largely uncontested – acquisition back in 2021.
Hines, it seems, was not particularly elated with his new parent company:
“I was staying there because this place still needs me. I just hit a point of yes, it needs me, and I am powerless to do what I think needs to be done to run this place properly, to protect these people, to maintain what we worked so hard to create, which is an incredibly efficient, well-run video game developer and publisher.
And when I was unable to do what I thought my job should involve in continuing to have that place be, you know, if not the most efficient publisher in the game industry, it was way the f*ck up there. And when I couldn’t protect it, and I saw how it was getting damaged and broken apart and frankly mistreated, abused, whatever word you want to use, I said I am not going to sit here and watch this happen right in front of me.”
The executive had intended to leave in 2022, but multiple delays to Starfield kept him in the building until 2023.
As noted by Kotaku, he was around long enough to testify during the FTC’s trial involving Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision, and had circulated an email internally asking why Call of Duty would remain multiplatform when Bethesda’s games were being made exclusive.
(Xbox wouldn’t start porting titles to the PS5 until its infamous “only four games” broadcast in early 2024.)
Microsoft famously struck a deal with Disney in order to make Indiana Jones and the Great Circle an exclusive, as it had originally been planned for multiple platforms. And Hines would subsequently have to defend that decision as part of the aforementioned court case.
The game would eventually release on the PS5 anyway, and is also planned to deploy on the Switch 2 later this year.
Without mentioning anyone specifically, Hines said there were people at Microsoft he “genuinely held in high regard”, but the worst part of his career was seeing “how it actually worked”.
He explained:
“To talk is something, right? But I’m very much about: what is the follow-up to that? Do you mean what you say? Or are you just saying sh*t that sounds good and then as soon as you leave this room that’s completely forgotten? Because that is not how we ever operated at Bethesda.
That’s not to say everything [Bethesda] said, we did. Yeah, we probably didn’t f*cking come close to that, but that was absolutely our intention. We are going to do what we say and say what we do and be genuine and be authentic. And truthfully, I still think Bethesda is just part of something that is not authentic and is not genuine. And that shouldn’t be a surprise to you.”
Ouch.