Pete Hines had worked at Bethesda for 24 years before he announced his retirement in 2023, just a month after Starfield‘s release. The outgoing VP of comms and marketing said in a new interview that he’d been planning to leave for a while after the Microsoft acquisition concluded because he felt “powerless to do what I think needs to be done to run this place properly.”
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’s Firezide Chat newsletter that the new owners turned out to be a bad fit for Bethesda and made his job of managing the storied game studio’s reputation impossible.
“I was staying there because this place still needs me,” Hines said. “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 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’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.”
Hines gave his notice but ended up staying on longer than expected post-acquisition because of Starfield‘s 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.
The Bethesda veteran was one of the people called on to testify during the FTC trial over Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Hines had circulated an email internally complaining about Call of Duty remaining multiplatform while Bethesda’s games were forced to become Xbox exclusives.
He was later required to defend, on the stand, why a game like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle might benefit from only launching on one platform. It had originally been planned as a multiplatform release when Bethesda was independent, and has subsequently come to both PS5 and Switch 2 as Microsoft has pivoted away from exclusives across most of its first-party studios.
Hines said the worst part of his career 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.”
He continued, “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.”
Hines, who joined Bethesda on the ground floor right out of college, helping it with guides for its games and rising through the ranks to later be presenting its games on stage at E3, didn’t specify who at Microsoft or which parts of its business culture he was specifically referring to, but there’s clearly no love lost for the Xbox maker–turned–AI hyperscaler.
“That’s not to say everything [Bethesda] said, we did,” he added. “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.”
