The latest comments from Phil Spencer — the head of Xbox — are seemingly bad news for PlayStation players hoping to play some of the next generation’s biggest games on PS5. Last month, Microsoft announced the acquisition of Bethesda’s parent company ZeniMax media. This means Microsoft now owns the following series: The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Starfield, DOOM, Wolfenstein, Dishonored, Prey, Rage, The Evil Within, Ghostwire Tokyo, and Death Loop. That’s a lot of valuable IP Microsoft now controls, and it looks like most of it won’t be coming to the PS5.
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While Microsoft has already confirmed Bethesda games already announced for the PS5 are still coming to the console, it doesn’t look like this will continue with future releases, or at least Spencer isn’t committing to bringing future Bethesda games to PS5.
During a new interview, Spencer was asked if it’s possible for Microsoft to recoup its $7.5 billion investment in Bethesda if it doesn’t bring games like The Elder Scrolls 6 to PS5. Replying to this, Spencer quickly said “yes.”
“I don’t want to be flip about that,” added Spencer. “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.”
As you can see, Spencer doesn’t outright say future Bethesda games won’t come to PS5, but you can see Spencer already has a vision on how to bring these games to a vast audience that doesn’t include the next-gen PlayStation system.
Most of Xbox’s first-party games don’t come to PlayStation systems now, and it’s hard to see that changing. However, via xCloud, Spencer can bring these games to not just Xbox and PC, but mobile devices, which allows him to hang his hat on Microsoft’s ambition and commitment to bringing games to as many players as possible.
H/T, Kotaku.
