So Microsoft just bought Bethesda. Or ZeniMax Media, technically, which is the parent company that owns Bethesda Softworks, id Software, Arkane, MachineGames, and a handful of other studios I've sunk hundreds of hours into games from. $7.5 billion, all cash, announced this morning. And I'm sitting here with a PS5 preorder confirmation email still open in another tab, doing math I don't like the answer to.
Let me back up a few days, because this didn't come out of nowhere for me personally even if the acquisition itself was a surprise.
Last Wednesday night I was refreshing Best Buy's website at like 9:40pm because word had gotten out that PS5 preorders were live early, way ahead of the "official" Thursday morning window Sony had announced. My cart kept timing out. Walmart's site just straight up crashed for a while. I finally got a digital edition PS5 preorder through on GameStop of all places, after three failed attempts elsewhere, sometime around 10:15pm. Felt like winning a small, dumb lottery. My brother didn't get one at all and is still annoyed about it, which, fair.
So that's where my head was at. Then this morning I open Twitter and see Phil Spencer's blog post about ZeniMax and my first thought wasn't "wow, big business news," it was "wait, does this mean Starfield isn't coming to my new PlayStation."
Nobody's said that outright yet. The official language is the usual acquisition-announcement stuff, deal expected to close in Microsoft's fiscal year 2021, games will "continue" to be developed, nothing definitive about exclusivity going forward. But come on. Microsoft doesn't spend $7.5 billion so it can keep publishing Fallout and The Elder Scrolls on its direct competitor's box. That's not how any of this works. I fully expect Starfield and whatever the next Elder Scrolls game ends up being to land on Xbox and PC only, and probably some of the smaller stuff too, the Arkane games especially since Deathloop was already announced as a timed PS5 exclusive before any of this happened (which is a funny wrinkle nobody's addressed yet).
I want to be clear I don't think this is some evil scheme, it's just business and honestly a smart one for Microsoft. Xbox Series X and Series S launch in about seven weeks with, if we're honest, a pretty thin exclusive lineup at launch. Halo Infinite got delayed to next year over the summer. Buying up one of the most respected publishers in the industry, the studio behind Skyrim, Doom, Fallout, Dishonored, Wolfenstein, is exactly the kind of move you make when your console needs system-sellers and you have Microsoft's bank account. I get it. I just also get to be a little bummed about it as somebody who plays these games on whatever hardware happens to run them best, which up to now has usually meant PlayStation for me.
The part that annoys me more than the exclusivity speculation, honestly, is the timing. I put money down on a PS5 five days ago based on the lineup and ecosystem as I understood it at that moment, and now the ground's shifted under a purchase I already made. That's not Microsoft's fault, deals like this take months to put together behind closed doors, it's just bad luck on my end. Doesn't make it less annoying at 11am on a Monday.
Anyway. Bethesda's games aren't going anywhere overnight, id Software just put out Doom Eternal's first big update a few weeks back and that's obviously staying multiplatform for now, and none of this actually closes for months yet. There's plenty of time for Microsoft to say something more concrete, or for me to just accept I might end up needing two consoles like some kind of unhinged person with a TV stand that's too small for this hobby. I already know which way I'm leaning.
Xbox Series X preorders open Tuesday, by the way. I have a feeling this week isn't done giving me things to refresh a webpage over.