Xbox can recoup $7.5 billion Bethesda investment without going multi-platform, says Spencer

Xbox boss Phil Spencer is confident Microsoft can recoup the funds spent on acquiring Bethesda, without releasing the studio's games on other consoles.

Speaking with Kotaku, Spencer said "yes," Microsoft will be able to recoup its $7.5 billion investment without releasing Bethesda games, such as The Elder Scrolls 6, on other consoles.

"I don’t want to be flip about that. This deal was not done to take games away from another player base like that,” he said. “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."

When the acquisition was announced, Microsoft said all current contracts signed by Bethesda will be honored. This means exclusivity deals for the titles Deathloop and Ghostwire: Tokyo will be honored.

So while Spencer never came out and explicitly said every single Bethesda or ZeniMax game would be a console exclusive, it's quite possible PS5 players won't be able to play the next Fallout or Elder Scrolls game on their system.