Microsoft is Confident They Don't Need Bethesda Games on PS5

A little while back, Microsoft shocked the world when they announced they had purchased Zenimax Studios, the folks behind Bethesda, who are the folks behind The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, and the upcoming Starfield. There were concerns almost immediately if Microsoft planned to allow Bethesda games to come out on PlayStation consoles, and while Microsoft did say they would honor any previous arrangements, they were still uncertain about any other games that may come out.

Well, in a new interview with Kotaku, Xbox boss Phil Spencer didn't give any hard-or-fast answers to that mysterious question... but he certainly didn't mince words when he was asked if he thought they would need to release games on the PlayStation in order to recoup their massive $7.5 billion investment.

His answer was a resounding "no".

"I don’t want to be flip about that. 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."

Of course, this isn't an all-or-nothing deal anymore: Microsoft holds all the cards here, and their options are pretty varied. They could put games out on the PlayStation, yet still try things like stagger release dates, charge higher prices for the players, or even give Xbox players exclusive content. I very much doubt anything is off the table right now.