TOR had massive fiscal mismanagement behind it tho, I haven't heard TESO having that.
True. It takes more than the game flopping for it to be a financial disaster - again, WoW recouped its entire development costs on box sales alone.
Just box sales. As in, if nobody had purchased a single subscription of WoW, it still would have broken even.
But that was a company which had good control over its expenditure, and that was willing to straight up set limits on the product (e.g. that it wasn't going to compete with EQ2 on graphics, as that would be an unnecessary cost that would simply limit the number of customers who could run the game on their rigs). EA seemed to have no idea what the target audience was after and so spent big on everything, without realising that MMORPG players will just skip the NPC dialogue while Bioware fans were unlikely to be interested in the ongoing raid/grind mechanics that keep subscriptions going after the initial quest content is finished.
I just don't see Zenimax making the same mistake. ESPECIALLY after TOR - the failure of TOR would have reinforced all of their fears about whether single player rpg fans would cross over to a mmorpg (and if they didn't have any such fears, TOR would have created them). And they haven't been anywhere NEAR as arrogant as EA/Bioware was with TOR. Everything about EA/Bioware's handling of TOR just screamed that they expected it to (at least initially) smash WoW, and they budgeted accordingly.