A decade in Tamriel: Takeaways as Elder Scrolls Online turns ten
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Last week, The Elder Scrolls Online turned ten years old. The game's creative director Matt Firor has been there from day one.
Even longer than that, actually. When the game's developer Zenimax Online Studios was first announced in 2007, Firor was the person put in charge.
When we speak with Firor at the Game Developers Conference, we ask him what keeps him interested in working on one title for that long a stretch, his answer comes readily. If nothing else, it's a question he's considered before.
"I think the fact that we're pretty much the current Elder Scrolls game plays a lot into it, because we have been kind of the flag carrier since 2014 for the whole IP," Firor says. "We work daily with Bethesda Game Studios so it's not like we're off on our own running in a crazy, chaotic direction, but we've introduced a lot of lore to the Elder Scrolls universe, and that obviously is something we love because it's such a beloved, established IP.
"But I think the simple answer to that question is we just love giving a home to people that want to play the game. We play the game too. It's a virtual world-ish type game, so during the pandemic we had lots of people just doing housing, doing low-key things to get away from the daily normal life. We were very much a safe harbor for a lot of people. Our numbers were crazy under COVID, we had our biggest numbers since we launched on console in 2020 and 2021. All of that goes together. We have a community that loves to play the game, and our job is to make sure we're good stewards for the world they're playing in."
Given the rest of the industry's struggles after the COVID bump faded, we ask about how the game is doing now, and Firor says the numbers have returned to the trajectory they had been on before the pandemic, which he's happy with.
"It's nothing out of the ordinary," he says. "We're still very successful. We just announced we're about to cross the $2
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