Brand collaborations in games have long ceased to be a pleasant norm. But it’s one thing when a pop star comes into a shooter, and quite another when a game about Nordic dragons gets its own rack.
It’s about fashionwhich IKEA ordered and paid for: in Skyrim a Kallax companion rack with full voice acting has appeared. Bethesda did absolutely nothing in this story except approve the very possibility of an advertising campaign around a paid modification.
The studio outsourced the development; the mod was put together by a person who had previously worked on paid creations for Creations.
Part of the Elder Scrolls community greeted this turn with little enthusiasm. The argument is simple: a series with twenty years of mythology, Daedric princes and treatises on Nirn deserves a little more dignified treatment. They would like an addition or the next piece, not a shelving unit.
The counter-argument is just as simple, because in Skyrim There have been mods that turn dragons into Thomas the Tank Engine for many years now, and the world hasn’t collapsed because of it.
The furniture rack is generally not the first guest from the outside. At one time, Valve and Bethesda staged a crossover with Portal and the space core, the Switch version received equipment from Zelda. The scheme is the same everywhere: advertising formally works for the brand, but in fact it boosts sales of the base game, because without it the mod is useless.
Players chose the races of The Elder Scrolls universe that they would like to become if they got into the world of the game
For comparison, they cite CDPR, which put together a next-gen patch for The Witcher 3 with the participation of the creators of popular mods and released it for free, although no one has canceled the third sale of the same game on new platforms.
Another argument misses the usual target: blaming Todd Howard for re-releases and advertising deals is pointless, since the schedule and monetization from 2011 to 2021 were determined by ZeniMax, which has released a couple of mobile experiments in the ESO universe in more than ten years.
The audience has been waiting for The Elder Scrolls VI for almost eight years after that very teaser with the logo, and they are getting a collaboration with a Swedish company.
