Elder Scrolls Online: Build a $2 billion game by breaking the rules

Ask anyone to name a successful online multiplayer game and you’ll probably get a few names in response.

Fortnite, Call of Duty, League of Legends, Roblox, Helldivers II.

But there’s another title that celebrates its 10th anniversary this year and has been a relatively quiet success.

The Elder Scrolls Online (ESO), a spin-off of the hugely popular fantasy RPG series from Fallout creators Bethesda, has been played by 24 million people and has grossed $2 billion since its launch.

Developers Zenimax Online Studios began working on the game in 2007 following the huge success of the single-player game The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion two years earlier.

At the time, massively multiplayer online role-playing games, or MMORPGs, were all the rage, with World of Warcraft, Everquest, and Dark Age of Camelot attracting millions of players.

So on paper, Elder Scrolls seemed to take over the genre as a surefire hit for many.

But the game didn’t live up to expectations when it was first released.

Creative director Rich Lambert and studio director Matt Firor told BBC Newsbeat that the first version of ESO failed to resonate with Elders Scrolls fans or MMORPG players raised on those titles.

“We didn’t really pick a lane,” Rich says.

“We tried to address both and we didn’t cater to either of them the way those groups wanted.”

MMORPGs are traditionally about leveling up your character by completing quests and other tasks to gain experience and unlock new areas.

This was a big feature of early versions of ESO, and Rich says it made it difficult for friends to play together.

“It creates this friction, this really painful thing for you and your friends where you always have to be kind of on your toes,” he says.

Although the game’s initial reception was below expectations, Matt says it was successful enough to attract a “hardcore group” of players logging in daily.

Matt says this encouraged the team, but also revealed something surprising.

“They searched and researched,” he says.

“But they also did a lot of what I called virtual world activities. They got together and talked and danced and played drums and musical instruments.

“Even back then, players were spending a lot of time just living in-game with a virtual character.”

Matt says that this observation made the team realize that what players really wanted was “a virtual Elder Scrolls world where they can create an identity and go from there.”

Today, ESO features the standard story quests and battle arenas, but some players spend most of their time on various side activities including house building, the card game, and detailed mode.

“We have a whole gaming economy of players who are home decorators,” says Matt.

However, according to Matt, the decision to make this key at a studio that employed a lot of “old MMO developers” was divisive.

“There was a lot of negotiation and a lot of whiteboards,” he says.

“I said in the meeting that I wanted ESO to be more like Grand Theft Auto.

“Does anyone care what level they are in Grand Theft Auto? No, they just log in and play. And that we have to copy that feeling.”

“Looking back, it was the right decision. But it wasn’t easy.”

Rich adds, “Honestly, it wasn’t until people started playing it that they really started to understand where the magic was.

“But those first few months in the studio were definitely a challenge.

KayPOWXD streamers GeekyCassie and Dawnwhisper tell Newsbeat that the game’s sense of community is what keeps them coming back.

Kay, who got into gaming thanks to her father and has been playing ESO since the beginning, says long-time players refer to themselves as the “ESO fam”.

“That’s the hashtag we use because we’re such a big family and everyone is so loving and wonderful,” she says.

Dawn says the game’s players are mature, “not in the sense of the age of the players, but in the way they treat each other.”

“There’s less of the trolling kind of thing, which makes the new players feel less, and we’re more inclusive, getting them in.”

Cassie, who is a founding member of Black Twitch UK, has been playing ESO for about three years and says toxicity from other players is usually a big problem for her whenever she starts a new game.

But she says the ESO community was a much “warmer” place for her.

“It’s not about who you are,” he says. “It’s just about having fun playing.

“I haven’t really been playing anything else at the moment because I can’t be bothered to deal with toxicity.

Jessica Folsom, ESO’s director of community management, told Newsbeat that Zenimax has teams capable of intervening where players face harassment.

But, he says, “When toxicity occurs, our players often suffocate it before we have to intervene.”

A recent report by US analytics firm Newzoo found that the most played games of 2023 in terms of monthly users were mostly older, established titles like Fortnite and Call of Duty.

While ESO isn’t quite as famous, it has a 10-year head start on others trying to create the next big online hit, but it also needs to attract new players.

Matt says the game’s loose direction means it has the “opposite problem” of the competition, where newcomers are forced to catch up on content from years past.

With ESO, he says, there’s “a staggering amount of options” when you first log in.

“If you ask five Elder Scrolls Online players to describe the game they’re playing, you’ll get descriptions of five different games,” he says.

This is by design, but Rich says the “metric ton” of activities in the game can be difficult to communicate.

“We’re probably not doing a great job of discovering all these things,” he says.

“And that’s something we have to work on and definitely focus on over the next few years.”

Community manager Jessica agrees that “one of our biggest challenges in getting new players to try ESO is the misconception that new players – or even players who haven’t jumped in for a few years – will be woefully behind.”

With so many “amazing games out there these days,” he says, “just getting people’s attention among so much chatter can be a challenge.”