What does this mean for Bethesda Games?
Microsoft has officially announced that they will move forward with the purchase of game company Bethesda. Most of you are probably familiar with Bethesda or their huge blockbuster game franchises such as Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Doom, Wolfenstein, and more. Microsoft has agreed to purchase the company for $7.5 Billion.
More specifically the purchase for is ZeniMax Media – the parent company of Bethesda and Id software. The deal is stated to close in 2021. Microsoft has stated that Bethesda will still operate in its own division and retain current company structure.
So what does this mean?
Aside from giving Microsoft even more game studios under its belt and some control of these franchises, many may be worried about games becoming exclusive to only Xbox/PC. I personally don’t think the biggest franchises will become exclusive to Xbox and PC. The bottom line is if they did become exclusive they would be missing a lot of sales from people who only have a different platform. Exclusivity may drive demand for Xbox up, but at the same time Microsoft is pushing for cloud gaming with their newly released XCloud. This would remove some need for consoles, thereby making sales of copies of the games a bigger source of revenue.