But when Bethesda's primary Rockville studio was tasked with making that new vision of Fallout, it was already primed for key problems.įirst, Bethesda was apparently not interested in hiring and training new developers with online experience. The company most well-known for critically-and-commercially successful single-player games apparently recognized the business case for a multiplayer Fallout title after mobile game Fallout Shelter grossed $100 million in revenue over four years. If former developers' stories are accurate, Bethesda and ZeniMax upper management apparently refused to acknowledge the realities of multiplayer game development. 'Crunch is a failure of project management' is a popular adage among game developers in the last few years, but allegations in Kotaku's reporting seem to go beyond the establishment of timelines. If reports about upper management's dismissal of the needs of online games are to be delivered, a brutal crunch period seems to have been inevitable.

The core employee complaints collated by reporter Sisi Jiang speak largely to how overworked QA testers were forced to catalogue bugs that weren't fixed in time for the game's launch, but also highlight specific management questions that now involve Bethesda parent company Microsoft.

Bethesda creation kit launching issues