These days, the furore over Oblivion's Horse Armour DLC seems downright quaint. A couple of bucks for some mount skins? Amateur stuff. These days we're forking over $20 to recolour our portals.
But boy, it sure caused a ruckus when Bethesda released Oblivion's mini-DLC all the way back in 2006. It's one of the earliest big videogame controversies I can remember, and it caught Bethesda off-guard: In a chat with Videogamer, Skyrim lead designer Bruce Nesmith, who left Bethesda in 2021, recalled the period, saying "Bethesda, I believe, was the very first company to do downloadable content expansions… and so Bethesda didn't know what the hell it was doing at the time. We didn't know!"
With Horse Armour, Bethesda was throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what stuck, testing the waters of this newfangled 'downloadable content' thing with a bitesize pack of fluff on the Xbox store for a little over two bucks.
Players felt nickel-and-dimed and made that very clear wherever they had a voice, and the rest is history. Nesmith says that Microsoft and Bethesda were "caught flat-footed at the response to it," and "did not anticipate that at all." In fact, "only in hindsight could it be seen that that’s not what people wanted and that we basically thumbed our nose at them without realising it."
Anyway, despite being very angry about the whole thing, players still forked over a whole bunch of money for Horse Armour. Which, yeah, that tracks with pretty much every other massive gaming controversy since then. Per Nesmith, Horse Armour sold "in the millions, it had to be millions," though he can't recall the exact number. "That was kind of a head shaker for us: You're all making fun of it and yet you buy it." It's hard not to be reminded of that memetic picture of a "Boycott Modern Warfare 2" Steam group showing nearly all its members playing Modern Warfare 2.
Anyway, these days you can buy a videogame horse (and a bonus bag of premo currency, to be fair) for $70, so Horse Armour looks pretty austere in the cold light of 2024. Nesmith doesn't think Bethesda is responsible for that development: "You can thank online games for a much stronger interest in costume-related DLCs," he says. I reckon he's right. Bethesda didn't start the microtransaction fire, it was just an early ember.
