Bethesda Purchase Wasn't To Keep Games Away From Other Platforms, Says Phil Spencer

Microsoft executive vice-president for gaming Phil Spencer has clarified that the company's acquisition of Bethesda Game Studios is not meant to prevent gamers from accessing content.

After the deal was announced in September, there was immediate apprehension within the industry regarding Microsoft purchasing Bethesda parent company ZeniMax for $7.5 billion. After all, the time-traveling game “Deathloop” was earlier announced to be arriving first on PlayStation 5.

After previously saying that existing ZeniMax deals would still be honored, Spencer recently stated that Microsoft is under no pressure to release “The Elder Scrolls VI” on the PlayStation in order to recoup the billions it spent on the Bethesda purchase. He then added a bit more on how he viewed the acquisition.

“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?” Spencer said in an interview with Kotaku. “We want more people to be able to play games, not fewer people to be able to go play games.”

“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,” he explained.

Even as Spencer continued to push the Game Pass subscription service, he consistently said that it can stand on its own without the need to bring it to PlayStation or Switch. At the moment, though, platform games for ZeniMax/Bethesda games will be decided upon on a case-to-case basis.

As Kotaku noted, even if Microsoft and ZeniMax make games multiplatform and sell them for full price on PS5 and Switch, they can offer them at a discounted rate through the $10-per-month Game Pass subscription.

Regarding the delayed “Halo Infinite” that was supposed to launch with the Xbox Series X on Nov. 10, Spencer told Kotaku that he recently played the game but had no update on when it will launch in 2021. No updates were given either for promised Xbox Series X titles like “Everwild” and “Fable” and the console port of “Microsoft Flight Simulator.”

When asked if the campaign of “Halo Infinite” could be offered at a different time than the multiplayer should one be completed before the other, Spencer said that it’s not just his call to make.

“Bonnie [Ross, head of the 'Halo' franchise] and the team will go drive those decisions,” he said. “But I think we want to make sure people feel like they have a Halo experience. I think we can look at options like that. So, yeah, I think that’s something to think about, but we want to make sure we do it right.”