Back in 2006, Bethesda released its first piece of downloadable content on console for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. It was armor for horses and it cost $2.50. Players were outraged, but Bethesda made bank. “That was kind of a head shaker for us: you’re all making fun of it and yet you buy it,” the game’s quest designer, Bruce Nesmith, said in a recent interview.
The former Bethesda developer, who left a few years ago to write novels full-time, reflected on the industry-altering moment while speaking to VideoGamer. The company known for its sprawling open-world RPGs was testing Microsoft’s new downloadable content delivery system for the Xbox 360 and wanted to try selling a small piece of game content a la carte. The infamous horse armor was born.
Nesmith said he no longer remembers the exact sales figures for the add-on, but remembers it being a lot. “It must have been in the millions, it had to be millions,” he said. As companies have proven with microtransactions time and again in the decades since, a vocal backlash means little if players still open their wallets. Microtransactions, or “recurring revenue” as some companies prefer to call it, now dwarfs boxed game sales at many of the biggest game publishers.
“Both Bethesda and Microsoft were caught flat-footed at the response to it, [we] did not anticipate that at all,” Nesmith told VideoGamer. “Only in hindsight could it be seen that that’s not what people wanted and that we basically thumbed our nose at them without realizing it. So, part of the Horse Armor story is you’re going to make mistakes when you’re the first one in the water on something like that.”
Bethesda ended up shipping tons of other microtransactions for Oblivion but most were more substantive, including a Wizard’s Tower where players could live and grow plants. “We found that the price isn’t really the issue,” Bethesda VP Pete Hines said at the time. “People just want to feel like they’re getting a good deal. I’ll pay $3 for downloadable content, but it better be cool – and horse armor just isn’t cool. So if we had to do it over again, I’d say either we should wait until later for the horse armor or do it for less.”
Even if some players thought the horse armor was a bad deal, it turns out many more didn’t care. Bethesda later announced it was the ninth best-selling downloadable for Oblivion. Years later in 2009, the company said it was still selling daily.