In one of the most unexpected moves in the video games industry this year, Microsoft has announced the acquisition of ZeniMax Media, the parent company of Bethesda Softworks which is itself renowned for video game franchises such as The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Wolfenstein, DOOM and Dishonored. Microsoft reportedly paid $7.5 billion in order to acquire Zenimax Media, which makes this the biggest video game purchase in history.

"[This merger] allows us to make even better games going forward," Pete Hines, VP of PR & Marketing at Bethesda, wrote in a blog post today. "Microsoft is an incredible partner and offers access to resources that will make us a better publisher and developer. We believe that means better games for you to play."

Now that Obsidian and Bethesda are part of the same family, it raises the possibility of a sequel to Fall Out New Vegas. Interestingly, Bethesda planned to release two of its new games, Deathloop and Ghostwire: Tokyo, as timed exclusives on the PS5, rather than on the Xbox Series X/S.

In any case, are there any new games you'd like to see from this new acquisition?

UPDATE:

Speaking to Bloomberg, Phil Spencer said that the timed console exclusivity on Deathloop and Ghostwire: Tokyo will be maintained while future Bethesda titles will launch on Xbox, PC, and "other consoles on a case by case basis."

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UPDATE SOURCE

 

[Jayro]

they won't need to it will play like shit just like the rest of the switch ports like witcher 3, overwatch, bloodstained, MK11 and i'll stop there

Well Doom 2016 plays fine, so I expect eternal will too with it's better engine.

 

[JuanMena]

RIP sega, your iconic sonic know will be expensive than ever

my iconic know...

Leems Segit ༼ つ ◕‿◕ ༽つ

 

[GbaNober]

so this is what Xbox talking about in the past buying big companies/developers to add to their workforce

 

[gregory-samba]

Good for Microsoft! Their Xbox One console had no games I wanted to play and it looks like after a quick glance at what games ZeniMax publishes the Xbox X won't either. The Xbox One really suffered from lack of exclusives which is why I never bought one. Possibly if ZeniMax releases something worthy of playing I'll get a Xbox X down the road.

 

[Deleted User]

If Microsoft made this acquisition to make a "profit" yes they should keep Bethesda games on PS5. But if I'm them I would pull them and make them exclusive to Xbox/PC immediately. I would be thinking big picture not small profit (not sure how much profit they will make off paying 7.5 billion anyway).

I'm someone who plans to buy a PS5 and not a Xbox Series X, if they're still on PS5 this means nothing to me. But if suddenly they're only on Series X, then I start thinking about buying one.

 

[Bladexdsl]

Well Doom 2016 plays fine, so I expect eternal will too with it's better engine.

maybe if they dumb down the quality to as low as possible it might.

 

[pedro702]

If Microsoft made this acquisition to make a "profit" yes they should keep Bethesda games on PS5. But if I'm them I would pull them and make them exclusive to Xbox/PC immediately. I would be thinking big picture not small profit (not sure how much profit they will make off paying 7.5 billion anyway).

I'm someone who plans to buy a PS5 and not a Xbox Series X, if they're still on PS5 this means nothing to me. But if suddenly they're only on Series X, then I start thinking about buying one.

i think it will take them decades to make a profit on that pay off imo.

i supose they maight make them code or help code some of their games which is also money in the bank, but yeah even 2 generations of consoles wont make bethesda ips make any money for them to still pay for the 7.5 billions lol

 

[mightymuffy]

If Microsoft made this acquisition to make a "profit" yes they should keep Bethesda games on PS5. But if I'm them I would pull them and make them exclusive to Xbox/PC immediately. I would be thinking big picture not small profit (not sure how much profit they will make off paying 7.5 billion anyway).

2 words lads, and I'm repeating myself in the thread here: Game Pass.
How many people are on that already, at $15 per month? A while ago it was 5 million ...it won't have gone down since then will it... $15 x 5 million. Per month. That's revenue of nearly $1 billion per year. Now, get The Elder Scrolls VI releasing on the PC, never mind consoles, and PC gamers can get it day one if they subscribe, on top of all the rest on there - well a conservative guess would be a subscriber base more like 20 million. That's $300m, per month.... Why do you think Netflix is so massive now..?
They literally can't lose can they... they could even release the big stuff like Elder Scrolls 6 on PS5, make some dosh there, carry on being the good guys in people's eyes, and even the biggest Sony fanboy would still be thinking 'but I could get this, plus everything else they've made, for $15 per month' rather than shelling out $70 for the PS5 version of that one game. It's a win win for MS either way.

 

[Deleted User]

2 words lads, and I'm repeating myself in the thread here: Game Pass.
How many people are on that already, at $15 per month? A while ago it was 5 million ...it won't have gone down since then will it... $15 x 5 million. Per month. That's revenue of nearly $1 billion per year. Now, get The Elder Scrolls VI releasing on the PC, never mind consoles, and PC gamers can get it day one if they subscribe, on top of all the rest on there - well a conservative guess would be a subscriber base more like 20 million. That's $300m, per month.... Why do you think Netflix is so massive now..?
They literally can't lose can they... they could even release the big stuff like Elder Scrolls 6 on PS5, make some dosh there, carry on being the good guys in people's eyes, and even the biggest Sony fanboy would still be thinking 'but I could get this, plus everything else they've made, for $15 per month' rather than shelling out $70 for the PS5 version of that one game. It's a win win for MS either way.

Not sure if Sony would go along with it but why not put GamePass on PS5? Then they'd make double or even more than that. If they're going to put Bethesda games on PS5 why not just put GamePass too. They clearly don't care that much about the Xbox itself they said they don't care if you buy it.

The more I think about it though it would probably be Sony that would say no. They have their own subscription.

 

[pedro702]

Not sure if Sony would go along with it but why not put GamePass on PS5? Then they'd make double or even more than that. If they're going to put Bethesda games on PS5 why not just put GamePass too. They clearly don't care that much about the Xbox itself they said they don't care if you buy it.

The more I think about it though it would probably be Sony that would say no. They have their own subscription.

lol you for real? if sony allowed gamepass to come to ps5 then they would make no money on any games while microsoft would fill their pockets...

console money is not won by selling the hardware but by selling the software, and if there was a gamepass sony would not sell any software on their psn or even physical copys so that would make them go bankrupt very soon.

 

[Deleted User]

lol you for real? if sony allowed gamepass to come to ps5 then they would make no money on any games while microsoft would fill their pockets...

console money is not won by selling the hardware but by selling the software, and if there was a gamepass sony would not sell any software on their psn or even physical copys so that would make them go bankrupt very soon.

Don't think you needed the condescending tone added to your post to make your point but you're right I probably didn't think it through. It was midnight here when I posted that and I had just got off work from evening shift. I mean I did add "sony probably would say no" so I don't even know if your post was necessary. But hopefully it gave you a level up in feeling good about yourself.

 

[StrayGuitarist]

"[This merger] allows us to make even better games going forward,"

I will thoroughly disagree with that statement. Bethesda rarely makes 'good games', they usually make flawed games that are usually fixed by the community, or a sloppy fistful of patches, in my opinion..

But hey, Morrowind was a lot of fun. Could never get into Fallout 3, 4, nor New Vegas, and I hate Skyrim, but no matter what you think of the company, this is still pretty damn unexpected.



For the people who do like Bethesda, though.. I certainly hope this doesn't become like the Rareware situation where they try to produce games in the franchises that were popular before, completely fuck it up, blame the poor sales and reputation on "the fans just don't like it anymore" then relegate the entire company to programming dumb Kinect bullshit.

 

[mightymuffy]

I will thoroughly disagree with that statement. Bethesda rarely makes 'good games', they usually make flawed games that are usually fixed by the community, or a sloppy fistful of patches, in my opinion..

But hey, Morrowind was a lot of fun. Could never get into Fallout 3, 4, nor New Vegas, and I hate Skyrim, but no matter what you think of the company, this is still pretty damn unexpected.

For the people who do like Bethesda, though.. I certainly hope this doesn't become like the Rareware situation where they try to produce games in the franchises that were popular before, completely fuck it up, blame the poor sales and reputation on "the fans just don't like it anymore" then relegate the entire company to programming dumb Kinect bullshit.

Don't forget Doom, Dishonored, etc... and I can't believe there's many of you on here comparing this to Rare! Get a grip, Rare was already dead by the time they bought them, Nintendo wanted to get rid (for good reason) and the massively over inflated purchase price of Rare was just a sweetener - we all know MS wanted Nintendo themselves, they've said many times there's a direct line to them should they contact, and any money they want..
Obsidian, Ninja Theory and Playground Games haven't disappeared have they

 

[StrayGuitarist]

Don't forget Doom, Dishonored, etc... and I can't believe there's many of you on here comparing this to Rare! Get a grip, Rare was already dead by the time they bought them, Nintendo wanted to get rid (for good reason) and the massively over inflated purchase price of Rare was just a sweetener - we all know MS wanted Nintendo themselves, they've said many times there's a direct line to them should they contact, and any money they want..
Obsidian, Ninja Theory and Playground Games haven't disappeared have they

All very good points. Doom 2016 was a lot of fun, but I never played Eternal. Yeah, I'm not genuinely worried it'd happen as much as I'm just bringing the possibility into relevance. Either way, I'm just surprised at how little has been done with Rare's IPs to this day. It's kinda strange to me they didn't capitalize on the big N64 nostalgia boom a few years back more than that compilation.

 

[pedro702]

Don't forget Doom, Dishonored, etc... and I can't believe there's many of you on here comparing this to Rare! Get a grip, Rare was already dead by the time they bought them, Nintendo wanted to get rid (for good reason) and the massively over inflated purchase price of Rare was just a sweetener - we all know MS wanted Nintendo themselves, they've said many times there's a direct line to them should they contact, and any money they want..
Obsidian, Ninja Theory and Playground Games haven't disappeared have they

noone of them still has made any game while under full control from microsoft, they just finished the current already in line projects, only in the next couple of years is that we will see how they manage.

Also rare wasnt dead at all when they bought it... they just had releases conker and banjoo tooie lol.

they just needed cash because they were putting alot of development time on their games and were short on cash and im guessing wanted to hire more people for the next gen graphics and such.

once they were bought is when everything went downhill
starfox adventures ws made with what they left to nintendo, so nintendo took it like it was slapped starfox on it and just released it since its better than loosing all that money invested.

they microsoft forbid-ed them from making gamecube games but they could make gba games,since xbox didnt had a handheld device so they turned into a gba factory making like 6 gba games in a row, obviously staff that worked on n64 full 3d games were probably not happy to be relegated to handheld games, this is when many people lkeft the company during the gba games developments.

Then they made their first console game on xbox grabbed by the ghollies without much of the old staff so that sucked and ended being a mediocre game, after that they were put on even worse projects from them on, like asked to remove curse words from conker remake and so on, not even nintendo the kid friendly company asked them to do that... i dont think microsoft ever recuperated the money they invested on them imo.

 

[FAST6191]

Turns out I was potentially wrong earlier when I said there might not have been any word beforehand.

Apparently 2017 saw someone leak that Zenimax's owners were shopping them around a bit. This was years ago and occasionally you do such things to get an idea of players and prices to share with your investors (the lack of a stock price does make internal valuations a bit tricky) but it is not nothing.

There was also an update to the website covering some of the lead people that was noted on twitter by someone a few weeks back (might have to start actually running deltas on websites in the future for my sources).

Nothing particularly concrete as a mergers commission/FTC type report, leaked docs or similar but also not nothing.

Both were mentioned in a random video I was suggested (never heard of the guy before, though apparently popular with viewers of some other channels I watch according a mouseover) that covers a few other things

 

[UltraSUPRA]

"The fans will port them anyway, so we don't care!"

 

[64bitmodels]

Fuck Microsoft. STOP BUYING UP EVERYTHING I LOVE, YOU ASSHOLES!!!!!

It started with Rare and Skype, and then went on to almost buy Yahoo!, then they gobbled up Minecraft, and now Bethesda. STOP IT!

Uhh
Minecraft hasn't become shit though???

 

[pedro702]

Uhh
Minecraft hasn't become shit though???

afaik they had a deal where the game would always be multiplatform, in this case with xbox saying multi platform will be on a game by game case, just seems bethesda has no deal, they just wanted the 7.5 billions xD

 

[64bitmodels]

afaik they had a deal where the game would always be multiplatform, in this case with xbox saying multi platform will be on a game by game case, just seems bethesda has no deal, they just wanted the 7.5 billions xD

microsoft
the most pro consumer company but the one with the shittiest games

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This feels like Microsoft is afraid of losing this console gen yet again, and is snatching up more IPs to put into their game pass as a last-ditch effort.

simple, buy sony, boom instant win