Bethesda’s been more gung ho about releasing its games out of nowhere, with no prior warning, than most big publishers, and it’s a trend that Bethesda Game Studios director Tom Mustaine wants to see continue.
In case you’re unfamiliar, ‘shadowdrops’ are when publishers and developers launch a game without having announced a release date in advance. Sometimes they won’t even bother revealing the game beforehand – Apex Legends was famously revealed and released to the masses at the same time.
And, in recent years, Bethesda’s employed the tactic twice. Once with Hi-Fi Rush (which is now under the ownership of Krafton), and again with this year’s The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered.
Speaking to GamesRadar+ at The Golden Joystick Awards 2025, Mustaine explained that “we had a real successful shadowdrop with Hi-Fi Rush through Xbox and through Bethesda,” which prompted the publisher to try the same trick twice. “Todd Howard, the boss man, he’s wanted to shadowdrop things for a long time because it’s so great to be able to say, ‘Here’s the thing, get it today.’ It’s very valuable.”
The other part of the equation is that most people, according to Mustaine, have less patience these days. (We can probably thank TikTok and an overwhelming release slate for that.) “We all have short attention spans now,” he added. “There’s Grand Theft Auto, for example. I want that today, right? So it is an interesting strategy… I don’t have any ideas of what would be next, but I hope it’s not the last. Personally, I think it was great to own the internet for that day and, you know, give people exactly what they want the moment we talk about it. I’m a fan of that personally, but I’d love to see more people do it.”
What could Bethesda’s next shadowdrop be? Part of the fun of a shadowdrop is that we just won’t know ’till it happens, but the RPG powerhouse is reportedly back in the kitchen whipping up a Fallout 3 remaster. If I were a betting man…
Oblivion Remastered’s “physical” console releases will “require content download,” and fans of the RPG aren’t happy: “Why make something physical that still requires a download?”
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