Industry analyst predicts The Elder Scrolls 6 will arrive in 2019, is wrong

"Elder Scrolls VI is coming in 2019." So says the bold (and bolded) prediction of Michael Pachter, the much-quoted analyst for investment firm Wedbush Securities, in this article at Gameindustry.biz. The article includes guesses about 2019's gaming trends from a handful of expert industry analysts who make predictions about consoles, game streaming, and game announcements and releases for the benefit of investors. Pachter's prediction that The Elder Scrolls 6 will arrive in 2019, however, really stood out to us. As being wrong.

"The flop of Fallout 76 makes a hit more essential for Bethesda, and I expect them to accelerate development of ESVI," Patcher says.

We kinda don't think so, though! Based on everything we know about The Elder Scrolls 6 it sounds like its release is most likely still years away. It was announced at E3 without even containing a proper title and with only the tiniest scrap of vague footage to accompany it. Bethesda's upcoming space RPG Starfield is supposed to precede it, too, and we'd highly doubt even that is coming in 2019.

And it's pretty unlikely that even if Bethesda does accelerate development and leapfrog Starfield that ES6 could be finished in 2019 anyway. After the extremely rough release of Fallout 76, Bethesda could indeed use a well-received game launch, but rushing a massive RPG like ES6 out the door surely wouldn't be a good idea.

Pachter cops to his history of being wrong about The Elder Scrolls 6 in prior years, too: "(This was my prediction from 2016 and 2017...)" he adds in the same article. One of these years his prediction will be right, but it definitely won't be this year.

I'm not trying to be hard on the guy, honestly: he's clearly a very successful dude with two law degrees, an MBA, a nice office in a tall building, and his own Wikipedia page where I learned most of that. He also used to answer questions from gamers about the industry in his YouTube series Pach-Attack! for GameTrailers. Meanwhile, I'm typing this while eating leftover pizza and still clad in my pajama bottoms at noon. But Pachter's Elder Scrolls prediction is pretty out there. Maybe it's less of a prediction and more of an indication that he just really wants to play it? I know I sure do.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.