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PlayStation fanboys stand down! Lower your weapons! In an interview with Kotaku’s Stephen Totilo, Head of Xbox Phil Spencer talked about all sorts of cool stuff. He talked about the launch of Xbox Series X and Halo Infinite, but people are only taking one thing away from the interview. A quote from Spencer about Microsoft’s acquisition of Bethesda. “Is it possible to recoup a $7.5 billion investment if you don’t sell Elder Scrolls VI on the PlayStation?” Totilo asked. “Yes,” Spencer quickly replied.
“I don’t want to be flip about that,” he added. “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.”
I’m going to do something I rarely do in the Walkthrough and add some commentary here. I have a few PlayStation friends (Hi Matt) who are desperately worried this means that their access to games like Fallout and Elder Scrolls will be cut off. While that certainly COULD be the case, I also really don’t think it WILL be the case. What do companies love? Money. What is Phil Spencer’s job? To make the most money possible. I just don’t see them losing all those sales just to say that those games are exclusive, it doesn’t fit the new Xbox business model. Just because he answered a direct question in an interview, doesn’t indicate Microsoft’s multibillion dollar strategy moving forward.