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!"
