It’s been one of the major talking points of the industry this year; Microsoft’s acquisition of Bethesda.
The news rattled the industry, with many still wondering what it will mean for next-gen and beyond.
That’s why, when given such a chance, Kotaku was able to find out some things about Xbox from the guy who would really know the score; Phil Spencer.
Xbox’s Chief recently had an interview with Kotaku. During the interview, the acquisition of Bethesda was brought up.
Kotaku asked;
“Is it possible to recoup a $7.5 billion investment [what Microsoft paid to acquire ZeniMax] if you don’t sell Elder Scrolls VI on the PlayStation?”
Previously, it was stated how Xbox would honour any and all arrangements involving Bethesda’s IPs. That’s why Deathloop is still going to be a PlayStation 5 exclusive [though, we wouldn’t bet against it only being a timed-exclusive now].
To that end, Spencer responded;
“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?’ We want more people to be able to play games, not fewer people to be able to go play games”.
It’s been well documented how inclusive Phil Spencer has been in trying to make gaming a more accessible experience. Therefore, the sheer notion of exclusivity now feels totally out-of-sync with his previous rhetoric.
However, Spencer also added the following comment;
“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 go 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”.
Of course, Spencer might have meant a number of different possibilities here. One example could simply be that he doesn’t need to port Bethesda titles out to PlayStation (or even Nintendo) to recoup losses. However, that doesn’t mean he won’t based on his previous mantra.
Currently, it’s all really speculative, as you can imagine. There’s no real way of guessing which way this situation will go until it happens.
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ABG’s Senior Editor (News), YouTube content creator/streamer.