Microsoft bought Bethesda's parent company to stop Starfield being a PS5 exclusive
That's one way to go about it.
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Xbox head Phil Spencer has said one of the main reasons Microsoft bought Bethesda's parent company ZeniMax was because of potential Starfield PlayStation exclusivity.
This comes from the current trial being held between the US' Federal Trade Commission and Microsoft regarding the latter's acquisition of Activision Blizzard. As reported by The Verge, Spencer spoke of how Sony frequently pays competitors to "skip our platform," leading Microsoft to believe it needed to own Bethesda to stand up to the competition.
"When we acquired ZeniMax one of the impetus for that is that Sony had done a deal for Deathloop and Ghostwire... to pay Bethesda to not ship those games on Xbox," Spencer said at the trial. "So the discussion about Starfield when we heard that Starfield was potentially also going to end up skipping Xbox, we can’t be in a position as a third-place console where we fall further behind on our content ownership so we’ve had to secure content to remain viable in the business."
Microsoft announced it was acquiring ZeniMax Media, and subsequently Bethesda Softworks, back in 2020, for a grand total of $7.5 billion. That's obviously nothing compared to the nearly $70 billion dollar acquisition of Activision Blizzard, but it did mean that Xbox owned massive names like The Elder Scrolls and Fallout series.
As noted by The Verge, the main thing that Spencer appeared to be doing in his testimony is framing Sony as a hostile competitor. "Every time we ship a game on PlayStation... Sony captures 30 percent of the revenue that we do on their platform and then they use that money among other revenue that they have to do things to try to reduce Xbox’s survival on the market," Spencer said. "We try to compete, but as I said, over the last 20 years we’ve failed to do that effectively."
It isn't exactly clear on who is actually to blame on the topic of Sony outperforming Microsoft, but Spencer unsurprisingly would want to make Xbox seem like the little guy that needs the boost up to be on the same playing field.
Also revealed as part of the trial is the fact that The Elder Scrolls 6 is at least another five years away, so you can throw any hopes of playing that some time soon in the bin.