Bethesda, The Elder Scrolls makers, are developing a free-to-play AAA game

It looks like Bethesda Game Studios is looking for team members who have experience with freemium AAA games. For those unfamiliar with freemium games, they’re basically free-to-play titles. Freemium is a pricing strategy by which a product or service—typically a digital offering or application such as software, media, games or web service—is provided free of charge, but money or premium is charged for proprietary features, functionality or virtual goods. It’s an interesting way for developers to make money but the games always feel like those who don’t pay are held back.

Bethesda is looking for a Game Performance Manager based in Montreal for the role. There are rumors that Bethesda is working on a game called Starfield which is basically Destiny, except it’s not confined in scale. Bethesda has a history of telling amazing stories and creating stellar choice-driven gameplay which greatly impacts the plot. Hopefully they can bring their expertise to the science-fiction genre. While it’s too early to even speculate what this “freemium” game might be, here’s hoping that Bethesda make it an amazing one.

The video game industry is going the free-to-play route and it’s understandable that Bethesda would want to experiment with this monetization approach. However, freemium games have a habit of becoming inaccessible to those who don’t spend hundreds of dollars. If a major AAA game is going to be free-to-play, then Bethesda has to make it’s fair. Only time will tell what comes of this. Maybe we’ll get more answers at E3 2017.