Players are unhappy with how Bethesda is handling their beloved The Elder Scrolls franchise – a collaboration with IKEA instead of DLCs and a new game
Brand collaborations in games stopped being a pleasant novelty a long time ago. But there is a difference between a pop star showing up in a shooter and a game about Nordic dragons getting its own bookshelf.
The mod in question was commissioned and paid for by IKEA: Skyrim now has a fully voiced Kallax shelf companion. Bethesda did essentially nothing here besides greenlighting the ad campaign built around the paid mod.
The studio outsourced the whole thing, and the mod itself was put together by someone who already made paid content for Creations.
Part of the Elder Scrolls community took the news without much enthusiasm. The argument goes like this: a series with two decades of mythology, Daedric princes and Nirn lore deserves better treatment than this. Fans wanted an expansion or the next mainline entry, not a shelf.
The counterargument is just as simple – mods that turn dragons into Thomas the Tank Engine have existed in Skyrim for years, and the world hasn't ended because of it.
The furniture shelf isn't even the first outside guest either. Valve and Bethesda pulled off a crossover with Portal and its space core a while back, and the Switch version got gear from Zelda. The pattern stays the same every time: the ad technically promotes the brand, but in practice it drives sales of the base game, since the mod is useless without it.
People keep bringing up CDPR as a point of comparison, since the studio put together a next-gen patch for The Witcher 3 with help from popular mod creators and gave it away for free, even though nobody stopped them from selling the game a third time on new platforms.
Another argument misses its target entirely: blaming Todd Howard for re-releases and ad deals doesn't make much sense, since ZeniMax controlled the schedule and monetization from 2011 to 2021, and all it had to show for over a decade was the ESO universe and a couple of mobile experiments.
Fans have been waiting for The Elder Scrolls VI for almost eight years since that logo teaser dropped, and what they get instead is a collab with a Swedish furniture company.
