Pete Hines says he quit Bethesda post-Xbox because ‘it’s part of something not genuine’

Bethesda’s former head of publishing, Pete Hines, has said he decided to quit the company because he felt that The Elder Scrolls publisher is “part of something that is not authentic and is not genuine”.

Hines quit Bethesda in 2023, after 24 years at the company, shortly after the release of Starfield, which was its first game since Microsoft acquired its parent company ZeniMax Media in 2021 in a $7.5bn deal.

Speaking in a frank interview with Firezide Chat, the former Bethesda veteran claimed that it was always his intention to leave the company after Starfield shipped, and suggested that he was unhappy with the direction of the company, post-Microsoft acquisition.

“It was really hard to walk away from [my team] and not get to see them on a regular basis,” Hines said. “At the same time, I also hit a point of realizing I could not spend the rest of my life doing something that wasn’t for me. It was for everybody else, which is what I was doing.

“I was staying there because this place still needs me. I just hit a point of yes, it needs me, and I am powerless to do what I think needs to be done to run this place properly, to protect these people, to maintain what we worked so hard to create, which is an incredibly efficient, well run video game developer and publisher.”

He continued: “And when I couldn’t protect it, and I saw how it was getting damaged and broken apart and frankly mistreated, abused, whatever word you want to use, I said I am not going to sit here and watch this happen right in front of me.

“I think I’ve done everything I can do. This is not when I wanted it to end or how I wanted it to end, but that’s not really up to me. And at a certain point, truthfully, my mental health was so deplorable that I just said I cannot.”

Hines said he was waiting until Starfield’s release before quitting Bethesda, but repeated delays meant that he stayed for nearly a year longer than planned. “Every time Todd delayed Starfield, I thought, fuck, I’m here another eight months. And Todd was the only one who knew,” he said.

Though he did not offer any specific grievances, e-mails published as part of Microsoft’s legal battle with the FTC over its Activision Blizzard deal suggested that Hines was confused by the decision to allow Call of Duty to remain on PlayStation, while Bethesda was allegedly told to make its titles Xbox console exclusives.

Hines also testified in court, defending Microsoft’s decision to make Starfield and Indiana Jones (at the time) Xbox console exclusives.

The former publishing boss continued in the Firezide interview: “That was the worst part. Yeah, that was the worst fucking part.It was to join a place that I genuinely was a fan of and people there I genuinely held in high regard and esteem, and then to get there and see how it actually worked.

“To talk is something, right? But I’m very much about what is the follow up to that? Do you mean what you say? Or are you just saying shit that sounds good and then as soon as you leave this room that’s completely forgotten? Because that is not how we ever operated at Bethesda.

“And that’s not to say everything we said, we did. Yeah, we probably didn’t fucking come close to that, but that was absolutely our intention. We are going to do what we say and say what we do and be genuine and be authentic.

“And truthfully, I still think Bethesda is just part of something that is not authentic and is not genuine. And that shouldn’t be a surprise to you.”