Microsoft's Bethesda Acquisition: What This Means For Exclusivity
On September 21st, 2020, Microsoft shocked the gaming industry by announcing that they had acquired Zenimax Media, the parent company of Bethesda for $7.5 Billion. With this deal, Microsoft confirmed that all future Bethesda titles would come to Game Pass day and date upon release, excluding the previously announced Playstation exclusive titles Death Loop and Ghost Wire Tokyo as reported by Bloomberg. After this announcement a much larger question remained, would all of Bethesda’s future titles be exclusive to Game Pass on Xbox and PC or would we see titles like Elder Scrolls VI or Starfield on Playstation 5. In a recent interview with Kotaku’s Stephen Totilo, Phil Spencer, Executive Vice-President, Gaming at Microsoft clarified the company’s approach to exclusivity with Xbox.
When asked if it was possible for Microsoft to recoup the $7.5 Billion investment if titles like Elder Scrolls VI from Bethesda didn’t release on Playstation, Spencer immediately said “Yes. I don’t want to be flip about that. This deal was not done to take games away from another player base like that. Nowhere in the documentation that we put together was: ‘How do we keep other players from playing these games?’ But I’ll also say in the model- I’m just answering directly the question that you had- when I think about where people are going to be playing and the number of devices that we had, and we have xCloud and PC and Game Pass and our console base, I don’t have to ship those games on any other platform other than the platforms that we support in order to kind of make the deal work for us. Whatever that means.”
Based on Spencer’s statement, it is safe to assume that we will not be seeing Bethesda games on Playstation 5. Expanding their first-party studios from 15 to 23 with the acquisition of Zenimax Media, Microsoft has created a very strong line-up of upcoming titles. With highly regarded studios like Bethesda Softworks (Elder Scrolls and Fallout), Id Software (Doom), Arkane (Dishonored and Prey), Machine Games (Wolfenstein) and more, Microsoft continues to provide consumers an incredibly compelling reason for consumers to join the Xbox ecosystem whether through Xcloud, PC Game Pass or console gaming on Xbox.
