One of the main reasons Microsoft bought Bethesda parent company ZeniMax was because of its potential, says Xbox chief Phil Spencer. starry sky PlayStation Exclusive.
This is the ongoing trial between the FTC and Microsoft over Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard. According to The Verge, Spencer talked about how Sony often pays competitors to “skip our platform,” leading Microsoft to believe it needs to buy Bethesda to stand out from the competition.
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“When we acquired ZeniMax, Sony made an agreement with Deathloop and Ghostwire … to pay Bethesda not to distribute those games on the Xbox,” Spencer said at the trial. “So when we heard that Starfield might also end up skipping the Xbox, the talk about Starfield, we can’t be the third console, further behind in terms of content ownership, so we have to protect the content to stay alive in the business .”
As early as 2020, Microsoft announced that it would acquire ZeniMax Media for a total price of $7.5 billion, followed by the acquisition of Bethesda Softworks. That’s obviously nothing compared to Activision Blizzard’s nearly $70 billion acquisition, but it does mean that Xbox has big names like The Elder Scrolls and Fallout franchises.
As The Verge noted, the main thing Spencer seemed to do in his testimony was to cast Sony as a hostile competitor. “Every time we release a game on PlayStation…Sony takes 30% of the revenue we make on their platform, and then they use that money with other revenue to try to reduce the Xbox’s survival rate in the market ,” Spencer said. “We try to compete, but as I said, we haven’t been able to do it effectively over the last 20 years.”
It’s unclear who’s to blame for the talk of Sony overtaking Microsoft, but unsurprisingly, Spencer wants to make Xbox look like a little guy who needs a boost to be on the same playing field.
As part of the trial, The Elder Scrolls 6 is still at least five years away from release, so you can give up any hope of playing it anytime soon.
