So, I'm as disappointed as everyone else with the announcement of no more DLC for Skyrim. Only time will tell if there are any future updates, but my guess would be "no" as well.

The part I really don't get is the economics. Bethesda has a HUGE investment in the base game. All the coding resources, art resources, etc. that went into the base game were not cheap to create. When you compare the level of effort to create DLC, and I'm not just talking about bigger stuff like Dawnguard or Dragonborn, the cost/benefit for DLC has to be huge.

For example, if the base game costs $60 and DLC costs $20, that means that the effort to create the DLC was 1/3 of the effort to create the main game? I doubt that was true. I'm not saying that it took a lot of effort to create something like Dragonborn, but 1/3 that of the base game? So, why not just have a smaller team continue to turn out small(er) DLC for a long(er) time? Like maybe until the next big release that will turn everyone's attention to the next-big-thing. Skyrim still seems to be popular, so why cut off the DLC (and money) now?

Maybe someone can explain it to me, because obviously I slept through this Business 101 class.

Once I get all the Achievements I'm done with my Main Character. Mostly Because I did all the Guilds and Quests. Luckily I kind of forgot the Dialogue so I can keep making new characters and such throughout it.


I seriously have no idea why they stopped there. They're getting the money especially for Small Dlc's. I expected Hearthfire was not that hard to make. It didn't seem much. And alot of people bought it for RP Purposes. So. I really don't know.


But at least it Guarantees Fallout 4 possibly being better than it was.

No way it's anything else besides Fallout 4

The only thing I can think of to make them pull the plug on the DLC would be if they hit a snag on their other project and they needed to throw bodies at it.

I don't know if I can answer that question OP, because from where I am sitting, it doesn't seem like it was an economically motivated move.

Not to mention that launching a new game so early in the lifecycle of the next gen console is always a risk. On one side, you've less competing products, on the other side, you reach a smaller pool of consumers.

As I said in another thread, It's a paradoxical situation: we aren't people screaming for free stuff, we're people willing to pay to get a new product and Zenimax has turned us down. On top of that, the ROI for a DLC is much, much higher than for a complete, new videogame.

Imagine great painters like Leonardo or Michelangelo turning down their patrons: "Sorry, I'm tired to paint portraits and saints, but next year you will be able to buy from me some great still lifes".

With all due respect, Bethesda is a business. EVERYTHING they do is economically motivated. I just can't seem to figure out how, in this particular case.

It's the way the company is run. Other developers release games "When it's ready" but Bethesda rushes out poorly developed games to meet deadlines. The point has been reached where the whole of the studio has to join the developers who were working on the preliminary stages of Fallout 4 so it can be rushed out to meet the next deadline. That means shelving any unfinished DLC that was coming to Skyrim.

My hypothesis is that the development of the DLCs took much more time than they initially thought due to the PS3 problems. I am rather convinced they had still more plans, and even that they went quite far in the making of the next, now aborted, DLC. (If they didn't, they would have announced the end of the Skyrim DLCs when Dragonborn come out.) Now they were in a situation when their last DLC project would have come out very close to the release of TESO. Maybe their overhead at Zenimax decided that they didn't want two Elder Scrolls games to enter into competition, and hence killed the plans on further DLCs?

I feel sad, for I would have prefered that they finish what they (probably) started.

However, without further proof, those are quite empty conjectures and speculations.

I really hope Bethesda will explain
- what economic/strategic reasons motivated their move,
- whether they had still plans about future DLCs, and the nature of those plans,
- how advanced was the development of their next projects, and finally
- the reason for the cutting off of their plans.

*Sigh* It was totally random dude, like it was really right out of the blue. When they finished dlc for Morrowind, I said to myself "great ride". Oblivion I played on ps3 so nothing for me there. This announcement just does not feel right. Beth didn't lie to me, yet I feel lied to. They didn't betray me, yet I feel betrayed. I'm not going to lose sleep over their decision, just hard to understand the reasoning behind their choice to stop.

Exactly, I just want to know if there something more coming and if there was why stop it.

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1455621-the-doors-have-closed-on-skyrim-dlc/