Elder Scrolls Online director Matt Firor has made no secret of the reason he left Zenimax Online Studios, the developer he founded way back in 2007: he wasn't going to stick around if he couldn't keep making his dream MMO, Project Blackbird. He's convinced it could've been a hit, but he understands Microsoft's reasons for cancelling it.
"I think it's a missed opportunity for me, for [Zenimax Online Studios], for Bethesda, for Xbox. I think it would have been a fantastic game," Firor says in an interview with MinnMax. "But I understand the reasoning that went into it. This is why making games is always a heartbreaking business. No matter what happens, you'd be at the best studio in the world, and decisions happen that impact people. I didn't agree with what happened, but I understood the reasoning behind it."
Host Ben Hanson then asks if the decision was influenced by Microsoft's market tests. "I don't even know if it was that deep," Firor responds. "It's more, we're a number on a ledger and if that number is large, it is ripe for 'analysis,' shall we say. That number was always large, and over the years we always explained why we were frontloading a lot of cost and what they were going to get for it."
In other words, Project Blackbird's cancellation wasn't really about the game – it simply didn't look good on a balance sheet to the higher-ups at Microsoft. "Eventually, the industry just got to a point where it looked to the people there, and elsewhere in the industry, that that was just a very large bet and they needed to hedge their large bets," Firor explains. "I think that's what happened."
Project Blackbird was technically in development for seven years, but Firor emphasizes that it was not in full production that entire time. There were initially a handful of developers trying to shake out the game's backbone – what engine it should use, for example – and "then COVID happened" right as the hiring push for the MMO was supposed to get underway, Firor says, suggesting that it wasn't as if seven years of full-scale production had gone by with nothing to show for it.
Around the time that Project Blackbird was cancelled, a report from Bloomberg suggested that then-Xbox boss Phil Spencer loved the game, which made its cancellation all the more incongruous. In this interview, Firor simply acknowledges, with a smile, "Bloomberg did say that." Either way, he doesn't have any hard feelings towards Xbox at large – clearly, since he's still playing ESO in secret these days.
"In general, the people at Xbox were awesome," Firor says. "It's not a personal vendetta or anything. Everyone there was mostly good to interact with on a human level. It's just, big business is big business. It's like Microsoft is Microsoft, right? A giant successful video game on the Microsoft level was frankly not that stimulating to them. They want a business that they can look at that has numbers that go up, reliably, every year by a certain amount. This isn't Xbox – this is all public companies. They want reliable, forecastable business. Entertainment like the video game industry just doesn't work that way sometimes."
Firor compares the Xbox of today to the EA of 2008 or the Activision of 2004 – eras when each publisher had gone on acquisition sprees, only to ultimately turn around and shut down many of the studios and game projects which they'd acquired. "It's a business and it's terrible sometimes," Firor says. "I don't agree with some of the decisions, obviously, but the reasoning behind them makes sense on a ledger somewhere."
