Pete Hines worked at Bethesda for 24 years before announcing his retirement in 2023, just one month later Star Fieldliberation. The outgoing vice president of communications and marketing said in a new interview that he plans to leave for a while after the Microsoft acquisition closes because he feels “powerless to do what I think needs to be done to run this place properly.”
The manufacturer of To fall And Ancient 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 unsuitable for Bethesda and made its job of managing the famous game studio’s reputation impossible.
“I was staying there because this place still needs me,” Hines said. “I’ve just gotten to the point where yes, he needs me, and I’m powerless to do what I think needs to be done to run this place properly, to protect these people, to maintain what we’ve worked so hard to build, 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 entail to continue to make this place, you know, if not the most effective editor in the games industry, it was right up there. And when I couldn’t protect it, and I saw how it was damaged and broken and frankly mistreated, abused, whatever word you want to use, I said I’m not going to sit here and watching this happen right in front of me.”
Hines gave notice but ended up staying longer than expected after the acquisition due to Star Field(it was originally scheduled to be released on November 11, 2022). His departure ended up landing right around a crucial inflection point for Xbox with the disastrous launch of console exclusivity. Red fall earlier in 2023 and the news that some first-party games would begin to be ported to PlayStation 5 the following winter.
The Bethesda veteran was one of the people called to testify at the FTC’s trial over Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Hines had circulated an email complain internally about Call of Duty remaining cross-platform while Bethesda’s games were forced to become Xbox exclusives.
He was then asked to defend, at the bar, why a match like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle could benefit from launching only on one platform. It was originally planned as a cross-platform release when Bethesda was independent, and later came to both PS5 and Switch 2 as Microsoft moved away from exclusives across most of its first-party studios.
Hines said the worst part of his career was “joining a place that I was really a fan of and people that I really thought highly of, and then getting there and seeing how it actually worked.
He continued, “Talking is something, isn’t it? But I really wonder: What’s next for this? Do you mean what you say? Or do you just say shit that sounds good and then as soon as you leave this room, it’s completely forgotten?” Because that’s not how we operated in Bethesda.
Hines, who joined Bethesda on the ground floor straight out of college, helping with guides for its games and working his way up to then showcasing his games on stage at E3, didn’t say who at Microsoft or what parts of its company culture he was specifically referring to, but there’s clearly no love lost for the Xbox maker turned AI hyperscaler.
“That doesn’t mean everything [Bethesda] “Yeah, we probably didn’t come close, but that was absolutely our intention. We’re going to do what we say and say what we do and be real and authentic. And honestly, I still think Bethesda is just part of something that’s not authentic and not authentic. And that shouldn’t surprise you.