The Elder Scrolls Online has made nearly $2 Billion in its lifetime, 9 years after the big comeback that doubled its player count overnight
The Elder Scrolls Online doesn't always get the credit it's due for being a genuinely good MMO that's been putting out regular expansions and new storylines for a decade. Even though I mained it for a few years myself, I'm guilty of sometimes overlooking it in the shadow of Skyrim's eternal relevance and flashier MMOs. But the numbers win out, as Zenimax Online Studios director Matt Firor revealed during a talk at the Game Developers Conference this year. Over its lifetime, TESO has made nearly $2 billion and has no plans to stop expanding its world and story.
In his GDC talk, 10 Years In Tamriel: Success of The Elder Scrolls Online, Firor started with TESO's conception, when it was originally pitched as The Elder Scrolls: Origins. Its inspirations were drawn from World of Warcraft—in the era when so many MMOs were envisioned as WoW-killers—Firor's past work on Dark Age of Camelot, and the then-popular Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.
The TESO team had been working for several years already on that vision before Skyrim swooped in and set fire to their plans by resetting player expectations for an Elder Scrolls game. Skyrim had fully voiced characters, first-person view, and no minimap—all things that influenced the new direction for what was renamed The Elder Scrolls Online. Handy that they got to keep the acronym, at least.
Despite that effort to step up and meet the new standard Skyrim set, TESO's launch wasn't a pretty one. At the time, we weren't impressed either. «We got a lot of feedback,» Firor said during GDC, putting it diplomatically. It was an unfortunate storm of bugs, lack of a player economy, combat critique, and dissatisfaction with the required subscription, Firor enumerated.
A year later, after a lot of work, TESO had a comeback story not unlike that of Final Fantasy XIV's well-known A Realm Reborn pivot, in which it rebranded with Tamriel Unlimited in 2015. That update brought guild traders, a more sandbox-y justice system in typical Scrolls style,
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