Fallout 76 was an unmitigated disaster and absolute embarrassment to the studio however [1].

[1]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kjyeCdd-dl8

So? Lots of studios have flops. The point is they've had plenty more successes since Skyrim. I even forgot to mention DOOM and Prey. And don't forget, FO76 wasn't even made by the main studio.

Adding the back catalogue to gamepass (and probably taking it all off steam), is part of the price too.

Hell, if the price was $7.5 billion even after the FO76 flop, what would it have been if they'd pulled it off? Making a whole new type of MMO.

Fallout 76 is even the exact sort of "live service" game that seems to do really well on Xbox Game Pass. (Sea of Thieves is often mentioned by Microsoft as a gold standard live service game that exceeds exceeds "sales expectations" precisely because of Game Pass; it probably wouldn't have sold as much as it has without Game Pass.) Rumors are that when Bethesda put FO76 on Game Pass the player count went way up, though Microsoft remains mysterious about actual Game Pass numbers, and FO76 also released a major expansion pack and cross-play at the same time, so if those rumors are true it may not just have been Game Pass but the confluence of things.

That video is a year and a half old. I hear the game has improved since then, but I haven't tried it myself.

So was No Man's Sky when it came out. Though rare, sometimes studios do the right thing over time. FO76 seems to be having a better second act.

I think comparison is a bit unfair since nms is (mostly) single player while fo76 is not. If nms gets good (i believe it is good btw, I play it regularly on VR) it would still sell 5 years later but fo76 would be dead if it can't keep up player count high.

So yeah, a failed multiplayer/mmo game is a bigger failure imo, because it is hard/impossible to recover from

See also, Final Fantasy XIV. From disaster to IMO one of the most magnificent games ever created.

> ... stop the small minority of rabid fans that keep on harping about their imagined deficiencies of the creation engine with every new Bethesda game.

Seeing as there are still some ancient problems with CreationKit (physics over 60fps, widescreen support, etc), I'll be interested to see how much they will overhaul it and how many old bugs will have to be fixed by the community (see nexusmods "Universal Patch" for any CK Bethesda game).

FWIW the 60fps issue was introduced in Oblivion (it didn't exist in Morrowind) and that was because of the physics integration. However that is an integration issue and something they have actually fixed - in other games (e.g. Skyrim VR).

Similarly with widescreen support, there isn't really an issue with it, you can use any resolution by modifying configuration files but they just... do not bother to polish it up.

(note that any bug that can be fixed with normal mods isn't really an engine bug but a content bug - though some mods do work by hooking the engine executable)

The creationkit games are one of the few that have the two critical components that allow this, mod support and extensive modding communities.

It's easy to have no fixes, when it can't be fixed.

> I appreciate some Bethesda fans have a weird agenda, but you are wrong

> small minority of rabid fans that keep on harping about their imagined deficiencies of the creation engine

You post comes across a bit aggressive and insulting.