Microsoft can recoup $7.5 billion Bethesda purchase without PS5 sales, says Spencer

Microsoft’s recent $7.5 billion acquisition of Bethesda Softworks parent company ZeniMax Media has led to many thinking that Microsoft will be publishing upcoming games on Sony’s next-gen PlayStation console, but will that happen? 

At the moment, that possibility is still just a possibility. Previously, Xbox boss Phil Spencer explained that games would be coming to consoles other than Xbox on a case-by-case basis.

When asked in a recent interview whether Xbox will be able to recoup the massive $7.5 billion purchase without selling games on consoles other than their Xbox family of consoles, Xbox boss Phil Spencer responded with a simple: “Yes.”

The Xbox boss explained that while Xbox’s purchase of ZeniMax Media was to bolster their internal studios, the point of the deal wasn’t to take games away from gamers on other platforms.

[shunno-quote]”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.”[/shunno-quote]

“This deal was not done to take games away from another player base like that,” Spencer stated. “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.”

Spencer continued to explain that with their Bethesda purchase, those Bethesda games will not just be on Xbox consoles. With Microsoft’s evolution from the console space to Xbox Game Pass PC and Xbox Game Streaming on Android (and other platforms soon), they’re no longer console exclusives.

“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,” Spencer concluded.