Pete Hines had worked at Bethesda for 24 years before he announced his retirement in 2023, just a month after Starfield\u2018s release. The outgoing VP of comms and marketing said in a new interview that he\u2019d been planning to leave for a while after the Microsoft acquisition concluded because he felt \u201cpowerless to do what I think needs to be done to run this place properly.\u201d<\/p>\n
The maker of Fallout and The Elder Scrolls was sold to Microsoft along with the rest of parent company Zenimax in 2021 for $7.5 billion. Without ever mentioning the tech giant by name, Hines suggested in an April 10 interview with Kirk McKeand\u2019s Firezide Chat newsletter <\/a>\u00a0that the new owners turned out to be a bad fit for Bethesda and made his job of managing the storied game studio\u2019s reputation impossible.<\/p>\n \u201cI was staying there because this place still needs me,\u201d Hines said. \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n He continued, \u201cAnd when I was unable to do what I thought my job should involve in continuing to have that place be, you know, if not the most efficient publisher in the game industry, it was way the fuck up there. And when I couldn\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Hines gave his notice but ended up staying on longer than expected post-acquisition because of Starfield\u2018s multiple delays (it was originally supposed to come out on November 11, 2022). His departure ended up landing right around a pivotal inflection point for Xbox with the disastrous launch of console exclusive Redfall earlier in 2023 and the news that some first-party games would start getting ported to PlayStation 5 the following winter.<\/p>\n