Microsoft bought Bethesda’s parent company to stop Starfield being a PS5 exclusive

Xbox boss Phil Spencer has said that one of the main reasons Microsoft bought Bethesda’s parent company ZeniMax was because of the potential star field PlayStation exclusive.

This stems from the ongoing lawsuit between the US Federal Trade Commission and Microsoft regarding the latter’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard. As reported by the edgeSpencer talked about how Sony frequently pays competitors to “skip our platform,” leading Microsoft to believe it needed to own Bethesda to deal with the competition.

“When we acquired ZeniMax, one of the impulses was that Sony had made a deal with Deathloop and Ghostwire … to pay Bethesda not to release those games on Xbox,” Spencer said at the trial. “So the Starfield discussion when we hear that Starfield might end up skipping Xbox as well, we can’t be in a position as a third-party console where we’re further behind in ownership of our content, so we had to secure content for remain viable in business.

Microsoft announced that it would acquire ZeniMax Media, and subsequently Bethesda Softworks, in 2020 for a total of $7.5 billion. Obviously, that’s nothing compared to the nearly $70 billion dollar acquisition of Activision Blizzard, but it did mean that Xbox owned massive names like The Elder Scrolls and the Fallout series.

As The Verge noted, the main thing Spencer seemed to be doing in her testimony is framing Sony as a hostile competitor. “Every time we release a game on PlayStation…Sony captures 30 percent of the revenue that we make on their platform and then they use that money among other revenue that they have to make to try to reduce the survival of Xbox in the market. Spencer said, “We tried to compete, but like I said, in the last 20 years we haven’t been able to do it effectively.”

It’s not exactly clear who’s to blame on the Sony outperforming Microsoft thing, but, unsurprisingly, Spencer would want to make Xbox look like the little guy who needs a boost to get on the same playing field.

Also revealed as part of the test was the fact that The Elder Scrolls 6 is at least another five years away, so you can throw away any hope of playing it anytime soon.