The news about game company Microsoft buying ZeniMax, the parent company of Bethesda, Id Software, and other studios under its wing was a big shocker to the game community on that day. The announcement came out of nowhere and everyone was abuzz with surprise and wonder.
How would Bethesda games work now? Would they become exclusives to Microsoft platforms from now on or will they be timed exclusives and launch to other platforms at a later time? The game company did assure everyone at a later time that they are not taking away the privilege of Bethesda to launch on other platforms, but it would all depend on them if they do that or not.
In this latest interview with Xbox Chief Phil Spencer, he kinds of explains the deal in a different way. It sounds so different that he might be even saying that future titles might not be coming to other platforms at all.
Kotaku’s Stephen Totilo was wondering about the exclusivity as well so he asked Spencer about it in a certain way. Here’s how the exchange happened:
“Is it possible to recoup a $7.5 billion investment if you don’t sell Elder Scrolls VI on the PlayStation?” I asked. “Yes,” Spencer quickly replied. Then he paused.
Without any shred of hesitation, the Xbox Chief stated that Microsoft can regain the investment they spent on Bethesda even if they will not sell the title on PlayStation. He did, however, explained it a bit later.
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. 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.
Future Fallout titles could still come to the PlayStation side, but it will be a case-to-case basis, just as to what Microsoft said in a previous announcement. For now, they have the advantage of having all of ZeniMax’s games under their roof and that is a big booster already.
Source: Kotaku