Are you a PlayStation gamer? If so, when you heard the news that Microsoft is buying Bethesda, what was your first thought? “Oh no—what if Elder Scrolls 6 is only on Xbox Series X? What if the next Fallout game doesn’t come to PS5?” Nope, you weren’t being paranoid. As it turns out, future Bethesda games could be Xbox exclusives.
Yes, Future Bethesda Games May Not Come to Other Platforms
Xbox boss Phil Spencer was talking to Kotaku. Here is the relevant excerpt from the interview. Brace yourselves.
“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.
“I don’t want to be flip about that,” he added. “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.”
So, that doesn’t sound awesome. Judging from the quick “yes,” Spencer almost seems to have let that answer slip out without thinking. He then of course jumps into a long, vacillating explanation that hedges wildly. In other words, he knows this would be a massively unpopular decision—but he sees financial value in it.
Taking beloved series like these off of a platform they have long been available on is going to create a lot of resentment if it happens. Alas, it is hard to think Microsoft had other plans when it chose to buy Bethesda. Regardless, nothing is set in stone yet. We’ll wait and see what happens. Meanwhile, see our PlayStation news for other updates on PS5.