Microsoft’s Plans For Bethesda On Xbox Series X Seem More Clear Now

I always try to admit when I’m wrong and in this case, I am pre-emptively admitting that I am probably going to be wrong about an initial position I took when Microsoft first announced that it acquired Bethesda for $7.5 billion.

My immediate reaction was that Microsoft probably wouldn’t make Bethesda games Xbox exclusive going forward. Why? A few reasons:

• They’d still make a killing as a publisher selling dozens of millions of copies of future Bethesda games on PlayStation.
• They still boast a big advantage offering them for “free” as part of Game Pass while Sony would charge $60-70 at launch.
• Phil Spencer has previously spoken about disliking exclusives and the whole “us versus Sony” console war concept, and they want to expand gaming across multiple platforms.
• They paid $2.5 billion for Minecraft, and did not end up restricting that game from being on PlayStation.

And yet, the more I think about this and the more information comes out, the more I believe that yeah, Microsoft probably is going to make most, if not all future Bethesda games Xbox/PC/Game Pass/xCloud exclusive.

Why? A few other things to consider.

Shortly after this news was announced, Phil Spencer said that while current deals Bethesda has with rival consoles would be honored (Deathloop ironically being a PlayStation console exclusive), future titles would be on a “case by case basis” which does not sound terribly promising for free and open sharing with Sony (or in theory, Nintendo) in the future.

Next, you don’t really spend $7.5 billion on a publisher just to only put their games on Game Pass and not make them fully exclusive. If they wanted to do that kind of deal, they probably could have without purchasing Bethesda outright. There were rumblings before this that Microsoft was looking to buy Bungie, but instead of doing that (for $1-2 billion or whatever that might have cost) they managed to land a Game Pass deal where future content (at least old expansions and Beyond Light) is launching on Game Pass. So why would an outright purchase of an entire company (literally the biggest developer acquisition in gaming history) have the same type of Game Pass launch idea without exclusivity?

Also this week, Amazon announced its new Luna cloud gaming service that is going to offer things like publisher specific channels, for instance an Ubisoft subscription through Luna that gets you X amount of Ubisoft games for one fee. So with this purchase, Microsoft isn’t just fighting against Sony, they’re pre-emptively doing battle with the likes of Google and Amazon and these rival cloud services. Now that Microsoft owns Bethesda, there is a roughly zero percent chance that you would ever see a “Bethesda channel” on Luna, as Microsoft will keep that just for Game Pass and xCloud. They’ve already done a deal with EA Access too, which should keep that out of reach for Amazon. They’re starving out future competition before they really even become competition.

Finally, I just have really never believed Microsoft when they talk about how there’s no real rivalry between them and Sony and no console war and that’s all dumb and pointless. While the fanboy flame wars may indeed be dumb and pointless, Microsoft is still fundamentally a business, and they want Xbox to be the global leader in gaming. One the biggest things working against Xbox when stacked up against rivals like Nintendo and Sony? A lack of exclusives. And you really don’t buy yourself an immediately solution for that problem for $7.5 billion and not take advantage of it.

Microsoft has been eternally relying on Halo, Gears, Forza and scarce few others, and while they are developing new titles with other studios they’ve assembled or purchased, the Bethesda deal instantly gets them Starfield, Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Doom, Wolfenstein, Prey, Dishonored and many, many more series as future theoretical exclusives, if they exercise that option. And at this point, I can see now that there’s really no reason for them not to do so. They want you playing on Xbox and Game Pass, not on PlayStation or Switch or Luna or Stadia. That is fundamentally what it comes down to, despite what all their “we’re all just friends playing games” talk might otherwise suggest.

So, new prediction: Loads of Bethesda Xbox exclusives on the way. Count on it.

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