Earlier this year, The Elder Scrolls Online announced that it had made more than $2 billion in customer spend, and its studio director says that figure got highlighted partly to help shine a light on that game’s ongoing success.
In an interview with GamesRadar+, studio director Matt Firor says that the $2 billion figure, which was announced at GDC last month, was revealed “mostly to shine a light on the game.” That’s because, in Firor’s opinion, “ESO isn’t often talked about as one of the successful live service games. But it is, it very much is on just about every level.”
I can see where Firor is coming from. In a world where a handful of juggernauts often appear to maintain a stranglehold on the genre, even ESO’s attachment to the likes of Skyrim rarely seems to catapult it into mainstream attention in the manner of, say, World of Warcraft. But making headlines is rarely the most important thing for dedicated communities of fans, and Firor recognizes that.
“I think that [$2 billion figure] just shows the commitment that the players have to the game,” he continues, “and also that we at Zenimax Online have. It’s hugely successful, and we love working on it.”
There’s no denying that a game that’s been pulling in an average of $200 million a year for a decade is doing seriously well. Interesting, Firor’s comments come in the wake of a recent report (also from GDC) that suggests that older games took up a majority of total playtime in 2023, but while games like Fortnite and League of Legends were some of the headline games there, it’s interesting to note that there are plenty of other highly successful alternatives existing in the background.
Skyrim completely changed what people even thought an Elder Scrolls RPG was, so the MMO “had to radically change lots of things.”
