News
2Bethesda: Publishing Wet was the right decision
Despite a poor critical and commercial reception, Bethesda vice president of marketing Pete Hines told us that he has no regrets about the decision to pick up the game for release, but admits that the publisher is now focused on "bigger and better things." "Nothing is a hundred percent in this industry, you know," he said. Wet could have done better but honestly for us it did pretty well - it sold quite a few copies for what it was. It wasn't Fallout 3, but not everything is... we're trying to look for even bigger and better things so that you look at them and go, 'That's really a game I can't afford to miss.'" Hines added: "I'll admit this freely, I was [one of the] few guys who saw Wet at Bethesda. I was like, 'That's really cool. It's very different.' It's not a home run. You don't look at it and go: 'There's no way that won't be a commercial smash.' The graphics were not the highest end graphics of the day, but it had a quality, it had personality, it had an edge to it.
Source: Pete Hines interview
Comments
2There is a missing segment of the market for games like "Wet". Games that are not AAA and are not F. Games that are not $59.99 but would be a great $49.99 or $39.99. "Singularity", "The Sabetour," and "Fracture" are fun games in their own right but the $59.99 tag was way too high. I am glad "Wet" came out as I had a lot of fun with it but what Pete says that they are looking for the bigger and better things makes me wary that they won't be looking for titles like "Wet" which make a nice break from the sequel churn that we get every year.
I thought Wet was great. I played through it. The problem is at selling games like that at a lower price point is that they don't cost any less to produce. Maybe Wet did, but games the The Saboteur and Fracture had huge development budgets.
It does seem to be a big problem for the last two generations of hardware. There is such an oversaturation of games being made, the barrier to entry is pretty high. There's plenty of games that come out that I have to pass on because I just can't justify spending that kind of money when I have other stuff to play. If games cost less, I'd buy more of them.