American video game developer
Bethesda Game Studios is an American video game developer and a studio of ZeniMax Media based in Rockville, Maryland. It is best known for its action role-playing franchises, including The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, and Starfield. Bethesda Game Studios was established in 2001 as the development unit of Bethesda Softworks, separating from publishing operations. Todd Howard serves as the studio's executive producer, leading it with managing director Ashley Cheng and studio director Angela Browder. As of November 2023, Bethesda Game Studios had 450 employees.[1]
History
Bethesda Game Studios was established in 2001. Previously, Bethesda Softworks, then a developer and publisher, had been reorganized as a subsidiary of ZeniMax Media. ZeniMax's Robert A. Altman sought to grow the development unit, which was spun off from Bethesda Softworks as Bethesda Game Studios, starting out with roughly 40 people.[2] [3]
By 2008, Bethesda Game Studios was considered one of the industry’s top developers on the reputation of The Elder Scrolls fantasy universe and the critically acclaimed Fallout 3. Bethesda had created a unique role for itself, “spending years to create massive, open-world, single-player RPGs — hardly a booming genre in the industry at large — to great success, bringing a once-niche PC genre to a broad multiplatform audience,” wrote Gamasutra in their year-end best-of list.[4]
In December 2015, Bethesda Game Studios opened a satellite studio in Montreal under the leadership of Yves Lachance, the former head of Behaviour Interactive.[5] In 2018, two ZeniMaxi-owned studios became part of Bethesda Game Studios: BattleCry Studios was renamed Bethesda Game Studios Austin in March, and Escalation Studios was turned into Bethesda Game Studios Dallas in August.[6][7] Microsoft acquired ZeniMax in March 2021.[8][9]
Games developed
Bethesda Game Studios has principally been involved in the development of role-playing video games with their The Elder Scrolls and Fallout series for consoles and personal computers, most of which have been commercially and critically successful.[10][11]
In 2015, the studio entered into the mobile gaming market with Fallout Shelter based on the same franchise, which gained 50 million players by mid-2016. In February 2017, Howard said that they are in development of another mobile title following onto the success of Fallout Shelter.[12] This was revealed in 2018 to be The Elder Scrolls: Blades.
In 2016, Howard confirmed that while they are developing The Elder Scrolls VI, it was still a long way to the game's release. Meanwhile, two other significant projects are in development which are expected to be released prior to The Elder Scrolls VI.[13] On May 30, 2018, Fallout 76 was announced.[14] On June 10, 2018, during Bethesda's E3 2018 conference, the other project in development was revealed to be the company's first new intellectual property in 25 years, Starfield. During the 2021 Xbox/Bethesda Games Showcase, Starfield was announced to be releasing exclusively for PC and Xbox Series X/S. Starfield released in September 6, 2023.[15][16] On June 14, 2022, Howard confirmed that Fallout 5 would start development after the completion of The Elder Scrolls VI, with the latter currently in the pre-production phase of development.[17]
Expansion packs
