Few developers have witnessed the full arc of massively multiplayer games as closely as the founder of ZeniMax Online Studios, Matt Firor. From early text-based multi-user experiences in the 1980s to leading the development of The Elder Scrolls Online, his career spans nearly four decades of online game design.

In this interview, Firor reflects on how the genre has evolved, what early MMOs got right, and why modern live-service games often struggle to recreate the same sense of community. The conversation also explores the challenges of building and scaling a studio from scratch, adapting a beloved single-player IP into a persistent online world, and navigating the realities of long-term live service development.

You founded ZeniMax Online Studios in 2007 after a distinguished career at Mythic Entertainment, working on Dark Age of Camelot. Can you take us back to your early days in the industry? How did you first get into game development, and what drew you specifically to the emerging world of MMOs in the late 1990s and early 2000s?

Matt Firor: It was actually much earlier than that—the “emerging worlds of MMOs” that I got involved in was in the 1980’s. My first company was three friends and me, licensing a game called Scepter of Goth. Scepter was a text-only multiuser BBS fantasy roleplaying game, where up to eight players could call in via modem and play a text RPG together. This normally would be referred to as a MUD, but I believe the Scepter code base was developed separately from MUD by a company in Minnesota. MUD, of course, was developed by Richard Bartle and others in the UK at about the same time.

I played Scepter in the Washington DC area in 1985 when I first went to University there. Eventually, about a year later, we formed a small company to license that game and install it in Atlanta, where one of us was living at the time. Sadly, the company behind Scepter went out of business, but we managed to get our licensing money back, and then we just decided to write our own text multiuser game—and we did. You could do that in those days.

That game eventually launched as Tempest, in the Fairfax Virginia area, and we eventually renamed it to Darkness Falls due to a trademark dispute with the coin-op game. Mythic Entertainment came out of that project, and the server codebase for Dark Age of Camelot was an evolved version of Darkness Falls.

Your time at Mythic Entertainment coincided with the golden age of MMO experimentation—Dark Age of Camelot, Star Wars Galaxies, EverQuest, and others were all pushing boundaries. What were the most important lessons you learned during those early MMO years that shaped your philosophy on online game design?

Matt Firor: I think if you go back and play those games now (except SWG—pour one out), you’ll find them very, very hardcore and unpolished by today’s standards. This may be why they are so revered to this day—it took a considerable time investment to become proficient at the games, the leveling curves were glacially slow, and the gameplay was very repetitive and “grindy”. However, these very same mechanics fostered a sense of community and forced players to group, which made them very “sticky”—the relationships forged in those games are enduring.

I still am in contact with people that I met online in EverQuest—we chatted for hours waiting for our mage’s mana to regen, and in those down times, many friendships were forged. 

Today’s social games have forgotten this lesson, in the service of being more casual, having less downtime, and being more accessible. With the immense amount of revenue they are generating, they are obviously far more prevalent. This concept of going “wider” to generate revenue instead of focusing on a smaller core group of gamers has made modern games much easier to get into, but definitely less hardcore.

World of Warcraft, the yardstick with which all games of this type are measured, hit the mark almost perfectly. It is easy to get into, but very hardcore at the endgame.

Founding ZeniMax Online Studios in 2007 meant convincing ZeniMax Media and Bethesda Softworks to invest in building an MMO development studio from scratch. What was that process like?

Matt Firor: They didn’t need any convincing! Seriously, they recruited me to found ZOS and build Elder Scrolls Online, and were very upfront about it from the first interview. They saw the success of WoW and wanted to turn their own fantasy “single player” IP into a Massively Multiplayer experience.

At the time, they had no multiplayer or live service games, so they hired me to bring that experience into the company and start the project. I think it’s safe to say that the financial success of WoW showed them that this was a reasonably safe bet, in the context of live service games, which are obviously huge endeavors and carry a high degree of risk.

Building ZOS from the ground up to "a world-class online game development studio," attracting talent from around the world is an extraordinary achievement. What were the biggest challenges in those early years?

Matt Firor: Those early years (2007-2010) were spent building the team and refining the game’s design. Since I had been in the MMOG industry for over a decade by that point, I had a group of people in mind that would help me build ZOS, and luckily, I was able to hire many of them. Even so, we made many missteps—as young studios often do—which I have recounted many times in the past. I gave a GDC presentation a few years back that highlights some of these mistakes and what we had to do to correct them.

Case in point: the initial version of ESO was based on Oblivion (as Skyrim was obviously four years in the future when we founded ZOS), and the entire concept of what the Elder Scrolls is changed in 2011. We had to scramble for years—including two or three years AFTER launch just to make up ground.

Fortunately, we had a resilient staff who were able to pivot on design changes, revenue model changes, server structure changes, and many, many other daily crises that are the norm when making a game of this type. I think the one thing that we did the best was to assemble a team that had many, many experienced devs who had worked on live service games.

We had devs from Dark Age of Camelot, WoW, Eve Online, Warhammer Online, and many, many more, and having this built-in experience made the pivots easier, as much of the staff understood we had to evolve and change, even pre-launch. That is the nature of live service games.

The decision to create an Elder Scrolls MMO was both exciting and risky—bringing a beloved single-player franchise into the multiplayer space. How did that project come about, and what made you confident that The Elder Scrolls could successfully transition to an MMO? 

Matt Firor: There were two major factors that made this process easier. First, Blizzard did this successfully with the Warcraft franchise, which obviously was an RTS-focused IP for more than a decade before WoW launched. Second, the Elder Scrolls IP, especially after Skyrim, was the best-known fantasy IP in gaming, which gave us a north star at which to aim. We knew if we could nail the storytelling, and especially the world-building and immersive environment of Elder Scrolls, we would be successful. I don’t know of any prior attempts at community modding to make a multiplayer Elder Scrolls game—and certainly not on a massive scale.

We knew we had to appeal to Elder Scrolls fans by making the game approachable and fun for those who had never played a multiplayer game before (and back in 2014, that was far more common than it is now). But we also had to have great multiplayer systems (co-op dungeons, PvP, extremely challenging endgame content, etc.) to satisfy the WoW crowd.

It took us a while to get that balance right, but I think after the revenue model change in 2015 and One Tamriel in 2016 (where we introduced the “buy to play” revenue model as well as giving players the ability to explore and group without level gating), we got it right.

The Elder Scrolls Online has become one of the most successful and enduring MMOs, with tens of millions of players and continuous expansions for over a decade. Can you walk us through that journey—what went wrong at launch, how you and the team course-corrected, and what were the key decisions that transformed ESO into the success it is today?

Matt Firor: That would take a War and Peace-length book to cover! Seriously, we made so many mistakes and so many pivots, but by being able to pivot and change, and to make sure we learned from our mistakes, we got the game where it needed to be. The team in charge of the game now continues that amazing work. In live service games, you cannot sit still; you always need to add new features, refine old ones, and challenge the dev team to keep the game fresh and interesting for the community.

The team and I have talked extensively about correcting mistakes over the years, but I think some of the biggest changes we made based on customer feedback and emerging bugs were:

• Making the game more “Elder Scrolls” starting from about 2012, continuing through launch, and ending in 2016 with One Tamriel. We changed the quest system so players wouldn’t be separated into different layers in the middle of quests. We made it so any player could group with any other player, regardless of level or experience, outside of PvP.
• We made it so you could travel anywhere in the game from the moment you exited the tutorial, and many, many other examples.
• We had to retune our entire server infrastructure when we launched on PlayStation and Xbox in 2015. There were so many players, our servers were overwhelmed, and it took us weeks to retune them to support more concurrent players.
• We added Chapters starting in 2017 to give players an Elder Scrolls story and zone once per year, a consistent and reliable content stream is vital to any live service game...
• …but right at the end of my tenure at ZOS in early 2025, the team pivoted to a seasons-based content model as the game grew to be so large that adding 40 hours of story content per year in one update was just too cumbersome. This new Seasonal content strategy is continuing, and is really, really cool, as it gives the team more time to address old issues, to add new systems, and tell great new stories.

ESO pioneered the "Buy-to-Play" model in 2015, dropping the mandatory subscription while offering optional ESO Plus. This was a significant business model shift at a time when most MMOs were either subscription-based or free-to-play. What drove that decision, and how did it change the game's trajectory? 

Matt Firor: It was just the right business model for the game. Subscription wasn’t quite right, because, as was proven to us in the first year after ESO launched in 2014, MMO players were quite comfortable with subscriptions, but the vast majority of console-based Elder Scrolls players were not. We needed to make the game more attractive to them (they are a huge demographic), so we decided to match the model they were accustomed to: buy the game once, then play it forever.

We then added an optional membership, made it a very attractive value proposition, and managed to appeal to both crowds. This one decision was instrumental in making the game popular, and more importantly, with a very high retention rate.

There’s no standard answer to a “correct” monetization model for any type of live service game, as they are all different. ESO is an AAA game, so it has different needs, customers, and monetization opportunities than an indie multiplayer game, for example. Finding the right model for each game is vital to that game’s success, but there is definitely not a “one size fits all” model.

You were with ZOS for 18 years, serving as both Game Director and Studio Director. From your unique vantage point overseeing both creative vision and studio operations, what have been the biggest shifts in how MMOs are developed and operated? 

Matt Firor: The industry has changed many times over that time—31 years from the time I went full-time at Mythic, and almost 40 years since my first professional game project. Crazy to think it’s been that long.

I think it’s more illuminating to focus on the things that have NOT changed in that timeframe; first and foremost, the need to focus on the customer and the community. As live service games generate revenue over time, it is of paramount importance to make sure that every developer understands the power that the game’s community has over the game.

One millisecond after you open the service on launch day, the power dynamic of the project changes, as feedback from the community, as well as their playing habits, becomes at least as important as the team’s design and planning. On ESO, we leveraged this feedback to great success, especially in the 2014-2016 era, where we learned a lot of hard truths about exactly what players thought of the game, but we acted on that feedback in a positive fashion to great success.

The MMO landscape has changed dramatically—some predicted the genre's death, yet games like ESO, Final Fantasy XIV, and World of Warcraft continue thriving while many others have shut down. What separates successful, enduring MMOs from those that fail?

Matt Firor: When we were looking for publishers of Dark Age of Camelot way back in the summer of 2001, we were told by several large publishers that they were passing on signing the game because “there are already too many MMOGs” and that there wasn’t a large enough population to support so many. And this was pre-WoW! Crazy to think that, but industry prognostication can be very, very inaccurate.

The simplest answer to this question is that the three games you mention launched in a time when there was more opportunity to grow the industry, introduce more players to the concept of live service virtual world-type games, and keep them in the game. Nothing breeds successful live service games like having the reputation of being a successful game, and each of those three titles is a huge marketing and player acquisition juggernaut with extensive community management teams, marketing organizations, and very, very smart developers who can work hand in hand with publishing teams to ensure that the right features are making it to the market at the right time. 

It is very complex to make a live service game like Dark Age of Camelot, Elder Scrolls Online, etc., and it takes far more than just excellent game devs. I’ve long said that a live service virtual world-type game is a AAA game built on top of a gigantic and complex IT exercise, and this is just scratching the surface. Teams that understand this and have the budget to support it can be very, very successful.

Looking at the current state of online gaming and where the market is heading in 2026 and beyond, what's your perspective on the future of MMOs and persistent online worlds? Are we entering a new golden age with better technology and understanding of player retention, or are the fundamentals changing with live service fatigue, AI, and shifting player expectations? Where do you see opportunities and challenges?

Matt Firor: As each of the newer games must compete more and more with the older games (WoW launched in 2004, and MMOGs launching in 2027 will have to compete with it, which is crazy), this question becomes more and more important. Of course, AI will change many things, but it won’t change the size of the market. Companies that currently have successful live service games are in a massively better position than those that do not. 

But all is not lost! I think there is plenty of “room” for games like Dark Age of Camelot in this environment. Games with smaller budgets and month-to-month server costs can be hugely successful in this market. If you can pull off making a live service game, since game development tools have never been better and easier to use than they are right now, that can be supported and profitable with a community of a couple of hundred thousand players, you can give them a great experience and be financially successful. If I were starting up a new studio, that’s where I would be looking right now.

Matt Firor, MMO Industry Veteran

Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev