Before Fallout 4 was officially unveiled, many thought it would come in 2016. Most developers unveil the game one or even two years before launch. but Bethesda dropped on us a 2015 release date (on November 10th to be precise).

VP of Marketing Pete Hines told us the philosophy behind an announcement so close to the game's launch during a chat at Gamescom.

According to Hines, announcing so late in development just seemed to be the right approach for Fallout 4. In general, he prefers to take the least amount of time necessary to talk about the game, because the longer the promotion campaign, the more strain it puts on the development team to put together demos for shows like Gamescom and more.

It takes a lot of time and effort to figure them out and to put together that content. That's why the folks at Bethesda have been pushing themselves to do shorter marketing campaigns where possible.

Fallout 4, Hines continued, has probably one of the shortest marketing campaigns Bethesda will ever do, and so far it worked pretty well, but every game is unique and every situation is unique, so he doesn't know if they'll do the same with whatever game they're going to announce next.

That said, don't think a short promotional campaign means a small game. Hines explained that while they don't want to get into the discussion about size compared to previous Fallout games or other titles, Fallout 4 has a "really huge" world and "hundreds and hundreds of hours" worth of content.