Shack: What was the thinking behind making Shivering Isles downloadable only for 360?

Pete Hines: Honestly, that's our only choice at this point.

Shack: Your only choice logistically?

Pete Hines: Just in terms of how to make it available. The console does not allow for standalone expansions right now. You can't ship an expansion on a disc at retail. The console does not support it, there are other factors. We've had people email us saying that you can give away games for free in Official Xbox Magazine, and yes if we wanted to give away Shivering Isles for free it would be very easy. But we're not giving it away for free, and therein lies the problem. If you want to charge folks and have it be secure, the console doesn't support it yet. We've been talking to Microsoft about this for a long time, saying we'd like to make the expansion available at retail, but for the time being it is available only for download. We are hopeful that in the future it may be available as a separate thing or as part of something else.

Shack: Game of the Year Edition kind of thing?

Pete Hines: Right, right. But, I mean, [downloadable content pack] Knights of the Nine was a big success. It sold just as well as a download as we could have hoped it would have done if we had somehow been able to make it out at retail. So it's clear that selling stuff on Live, even if it's something that's going to be big like an expansion, is still viable. It's ingrained into people's minds. All the time, when I get on Live I jump onto Marketplace just to see what's new. It's such a part of what that machine is about that we don't see any issue with making it available this way.

There are so many folks playing Oblivion on Live. I think it's still in one of the top five games online, and it's not even multiplayer. It's just obscene. We released Knights, and that number shot through the roof, and we did that free giveaway for Mehrune's Razor and it went up even more. We did some little free downloads through Xbox Magazine and it went up again. People are just really into coming back and experiencing new stuff in this game. You can come now and do new things that you've never done before.

Shack: So this model has worked very well for you. Are you going to continue releasing content packs then?

Pete Hines: We may do one or two, but honestly the bulk of our focus has been on getting Oblivion PS3 ready, plus Shivering Isles is no small thing. We've spent a lot of time getting that ready to ship. That's been the majority of our focus. We may do one or two more things.

Shack: So no more standalone expansions.

Pete Hines: No, no. Well, right now we don't have any plans.

Shack: And the PC expansion is through retail?

Pete Hines: Yeah, just a standard retail expansion. No download.

Shack: If this is something you can comment on, how does Bethesda's relationship with ZeniMax Media work? You act very much like an independent developer in many ways, but are also a fully owned studio with a publishing arm.

Pete Hines: Sure. ZeniMax is really just a different parent company for Bethesda than the one we started with. Bethesda was always owned by somebody else. In 1999, right before I came on, just one parent company sold it to a different parent company. [Note: former Bethesda parent Media Technology Limited was acquired by ZeniMax Media.] ZeniMax is largely responsible for responding to our request to get Fallout. We had talked about wanting to do another project outside of The Elder Scrolls, and they asked what we would like to do. We said, "Well... We'd like to do Fallout." It was just sitting there, nobody was doing anything with it, and we said we could do a great Fallout games. They said okay and next thing we knew we had Fallout.

But by and large Bethesda is still Bethesda. For twenty years we've been a developer and publisher of video games, and that hasn't changed other than the size and the scope of what we're doing, having more than just The Elder Scrolls going on. Doing Fallout, and doing Rogue Warrior, and so on. It's expanded our scope and capabilities, but we're still basically a small independent developer and publisher.

Turn the page for Hines' final reflections on the industry and working at Bethesda.