Mange mener at introduktionen af mikrotransaktioner i i forvejen betalte spil til fuld pris kan spores helt tilbage til The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, hvor Bethedsa introducerede såkaldt "Horse Armor" til en forsvindende lille pris.
Men igen mener mange at dette var med til at normalisere konceptet, der i dag emmer igennem stort set samtlige AAA-spil, om de koster penge eller ej. Men spørger du en af designerne bag spillet, så anede udviklingsholdet ikke rigtig hvad det var de lavede.
I et interview med Videogamer fortæller Bruce Nesmith, der har været med til at designe de måske bedste Bethesda-rollespil, at de ikke vidste at de måske var med til at skabe en tendens:
"One of the things about Horse Armour that you have to remember is Bethesda, I believe, was the very first company to do downloadable content expansions," Nesmith told us. "Nobody had done that before for the platforms. We literally pioneered that. And so Bethesda didn't know what the hell it was doing at the time. We didn't know! Both Bethesda and Microsoft were caught flat-footed at the response to it, [we] did not anticipate that at all," Nesmith remembers. "Only in hindsight could it be seen that that's not what people wanted and that we basically thumbed our nose at them without realizing it. So, part of the Horse Armour story is you're going to make mistakes when you're the first one in the water on something like that."
Om Bethesda virkelig var "pioneer" på dette område eller ej er svært at sige, men det er ikke første gang at fans peger på Horse Armor i Oblivion som værende det allerførste eksempel på betalt DLC i betalte spil.