Microsoft recently announced the acquisition of Bethesda the parent company of ZeniMax Media in a deal valued at over $7.5 billion. Players on all platforms are now wondering what this means for the future of Bethesda games.
Fallout, DOOM, Elder Scrolls, and even Wolfenstein are some of the most popular game franchises Bethesda own. Now that Bethesda is owned by Microsoft all of these games belong to Microsoft too. This has caused concern for PlayStation fans.
News of the acquisition has been circling online for a few months now and Xbox boss Phil Spencer and Bethesda producer Tom Howard have been asked a lot of questions regarding exclusives during that time. The problem is that we’ve not actually seen any concrete answers up until now.
The future of Bethesda titles was announced by Phil Spencer himself, while speaking at a roundtable even specifically designed to answer these questions once and for all. Spencer said he was as clear as he could be when addressing the topic.
“Obviously I can’t sit here and say every Bethesda game is exclusive, because we know that’s not true,” he said. “There’s contractual obligations that we’re going to see through. We have games that exist on other platforms and we’re going to go and support those games on the platforms they’re on. There’s communities of players – we love those communities and will continue to invest in them – and even in the future there might be…either contractual things or legacy on different platforms that we’ll go do.”
When talking about the contractual obligations, Spencer is likely referring to two Bethesda games that were announced for the PlayStation 5 long before the acquisition was announced, Deathloop and Ghostwire: Tokyo.
“If you’re an Xbox customer, the thing I want you to know is this is about delivering great exclusive games for you that ship on platforms where Game Pass exists. And that’s our goal, that’s why we’re doing this, that’s the root of this partnership that we’re building – and the creative capability we’ll be able to bring to market for Xbox customers is going to be the best it’s ever been for Xbox after we’re done here.”
Confirmation seems to be that Microsoft want Bethesda games to be playable on systems that have access to the Game Pass. Unless Sonly allows the PlayStaion to support the game pass in the near future then those players are going to miss out. It’s possible that these games could be exclusive for a set period, before making their way onto PlatStation a year or two after initial release on Xbox.