Microsoft has been up to a lot in recent months, what with a new console launching and a new title in the flagship Halo series, but one of the moves that was most directly linked to us and our readers was the buyout of Bethesda and its studios to the tune of $7.5 billion. Naturally, one of the questions about that is what happens to the developers’ games from here on out? Xbox head Phil Spencer answered just such a question in an interview with Kotaku:
“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.”
In short, the games that were announced by Bethesda prior to this deal will still arrive to the platforms they’re confirmed for, and the platforms future projects will arrive to will be determined on a case-by-case basis. It’s simply that Xbox and PC players can get a bit of a leg-up thanks to new Microsoft-published games arriving to the Game Pass subscription service, which also packs in a bit of a discount on the purchase of new games by default.
In that same interview (and speaking of the new Halo Infinite), a question came up regarding whether the single-player and multiplayer components of the game would be released separately, to which Spencer replied that “the team will go drive those decisions” ultimately, though he also explained that “I think we want to make sure people feel like they have a Halo experience.”
