Microsoft Officially Welcomes Bethesda To Team Xbox

Well they said it. SOME games are going to be Xbox/PC exclusive

I imagine the ones in already established multiplatform franchises like Elder Scrolls, DOOM & Wolfenstein will continue to be multiplatform for the forseeable future, but I can totally see them making Starfield and Indiana Jones exclusives for the platform, the latter especially as an answer to PlayStation getting their hands on Spider-Man

This is great news for us Xbox players. Cannot wait to see what other news we get this week if any.

Anything in the works or contractually obliged to ship on PlayStation still will but I seriously doubt any Bethesda studio will be working on PS games 2 or 3 years from now.

Only new info seems to be games for Game Pass later this week which seemed rather obvious in the first place given how few games were in the first March Game Pass lineup.

Can't wait for Fallout 4 to make it's way to GamePass. I've never really played Bethesda games, so this is a great chance for me to see what I've been missing. I'm looking forward all the games to come!

It kind of sucks that the next two games will be ps timed exclusives and they still will not make all games from now on Xbox/PC exclusive.
Just feels wrong to me

Soon all Bethesda games will be exclusive. It's why they acquired Bethesda to begin with.

Look, I'm really excited for the new Elder Scrolls, Fallout and Stratfield stuff. And obviously, it would be great to see what's next for Doom and Wolfenstein. But am I the only person that really wants to see the back catalogue on xbox and sequels to Prey and Evil Within?

I doubt they'll all be exclusive as I think Gamepass is the main reason they were acquired and it makes that service a lot more attractive. As to whether they are exclusive or not, it doesn't really matter to me as I have a PC and will be getting a Series X at some point but it would be sad if we saw the end of things like the Doom Switch ports

Still wondering what "some titles will be exclusive" really means. The next Fallout and TES is probably 5 years away. I can't imagine MS will be flying the green flag over PS5 while Sony's readying the PS6.... Starfield....seems far enough away I don't know why they'd make that multiplat. I'm wondering if things like Doom, Quake, etc are the more likely multiplats and save the big tentpoles for exclusivity. Especially with Xbox now being the home of the big WRPGs in general. They have a "theme" the same way Sony has 3rd person cinematic action-adventure, MS can easily be the nerdcore brand for RPG fanatics.

@Medic_Alert One problem Bethesda has perennially had is a cashflow problem. Particularly the Bethesda Game Studios division. They have tons of great franchises, and a lot of great teams that could create new things, but they never have the cash and resources to actually do them which is why TES6 seems indefinitely delayed when it should have already been out, and instead we got the weird cash-grab "not an MMO" MMO Fallout..... Bethesda games on PS or XB or PC are great, but they have to actually make them. Even if the big titles are multiplat, one big win for everyone here is Bethesda actually getting more resources to have more output, hopefully with more quality, I'm betting. The fact that there hasn't been a TES in, TEN YEARS, their flagship franchise....and it's still not slated for some years future still.... Their most current game is painfully dated still.

Think about their timeline. 6 years since the latest Fallout. 10 years since the latest TES. TES:O doesn't count, that's a whole separate company at Zeni that makes that. And then they did 76 as the "big new game of the half decade" - which was just a re-use of Fallout 4 assets.

So even if they came out and made the big stuff multiplat, the win for gamers in general is we'll actually get content for the first time in a decade because MS can foot the bill a lot better. Though we're still YEARS off from another TES, which is just depressing.

Maybe they can float a Morrowind or Oblivion remake or something to make the time go faster.

Welcome to the A side Bethesda.. Can't wait for them to announce Elder Scrolls Exclusively for Xbox..

This is awesome and I can't wait to see what Bethesda has in store for the future of Xbox.

@Medic_Alert As a PS and Xbox owner I really can't agree about PS having more game diversity. From first party, I'd say the advantages Sony used to have in diversity have been systematically torched over the past 4 years, culminating in their most diverse studio disbanding last month. I used to champion their comparative diversity? Now? It's all the same 3rd person adventure across the board from first party. There's more J-studios for now in general, for now, but I don't actually expect them to remain there other than when they're moneyhatted. Nintendo has their audience now.

I still don't get the impression XB owners buy it "for the excluuuusives", I think that's the reasoning PS owners give for why they won't buy Xbox.

XB will get some exclusives, that much is confirmed. But I'm not sure if "Microsoft funded really awesome game only on my Xbox" vs "Microsoft funded really exclusive game I can play on PS5" really makes a difference to me as a gamer. I really don't know if it makes much difference to MS as a company either. They're a software company, not a hardware company. The hardware exists to sell the software. They brought Office to Mac ages ago. They've ported their development tools to open source, and support mac and unix now. It's sort of their company DNA to be platform agnostic but provide the tightest integration in their own platform. I don't think they're hurting for it. Internet fanboys get hurt over it. Internally I dont' think they care about Xbox consoles at all - it's just another way to enter the overall ecosystem. Likely they'd rather you play on PC or cloud, anyway.

I just think when it comes to MS, it's the wrong argument that's always made by people that are looking for a reason to not like something rather than looking for reasons to like it. Would MS do well to have some big exclusives? Maybe. Is it the be all in the game they're playing? No. That's Sonytendo's game. And DisneyFlix.

@Medic_Alert And Ubisoft's games are all unique and different....and also cut out of the same template from each other. Sony has changed dramatically from being a developer of innovative and risky titles to a developer of high budget "safe" titles for the mass market. Focus-group tested, guaranteed sales successes to a mass market. Comfort food movies. Same as most big budget western publishers. MS is actually more experimental right now with more off-the-cuff (if not well received) projects. They've become everything MS was in the 360 era.

Returnal does indeed look different/experimental. I'm not into a procedural rogue-like so I haven't been following it closely, but that one's a bit outside their template, though it's not 1st party, it's just a third party exclusive, like Deathloop, so it's not indicative of what Sony's own studios are doing. Of course at $70 they're sending it to die, but that's another matter. Agreed on Dreams and LBP/Sackboy. I think MM is their one permissibly rogue studio at this point. I know Sumo did Sackboy, and did a tremendous job, but they're working from MM's baseline. And GT, well, that's the one (and only) holdover they still have from "old Playstation", and one of their last two surviving Japanese studios, at all.... I'm honestly curious how GT will sell this time and how it will affect the studio if it's not the next Naughty Dog hit. They seem to be looking for reasons to get everything out of Japan they can.

For the masses, you're right about one console per household having to choose. And Sony will "win" that market, maybe in the US by a thinner margin. But, there's a little bit of a "choose your market" scenario there. Sony, like their games, is aiming for the mass market. The people who buy one console to get it all....but...those are also the people that aren't going to buy a lot of games. MS seems to be targeting the spendier customer, the more enthusiastic buyer and trier of new content. While also hedging against the entry level low-spend customer with the Series S. PS gets a big install base by being the default, and they move more exclusives to a dedicated audience. MS gets heavier spenders in the software arena, which is the real meat.

It seems pretty clear with XB, that their goal isn't on hardware sales, exclusives, closed ecosystems, etc. etc. Sony and Nintendo have always focused on, as Furukawa put it, the hardware coupled software model. But technically both learned the wrong lesson from their own origin. Yamauchi said himself "A Nintendo is just a box to play Mario on." The MS philosophy is actually Yamauchi's original thinking. Console sales aren't the goal, they're just an entry point for buying software. At some point, Yokoi's philosophy took over Nintendo and they started focusing on a hardware gimick to tie the software to. It works for them. For a time. But then failed horribly. Switch has a great hardware gimmick, but mostly it's back to being "a box to re-buy Mario on (until Mar31.)" Sony went too deep into selling hardware units. It's their nature. They're a VCR maker. They treated playstations like VCRs for decades. It worked. Now, they seem to be transitioning to the film studio model. Makes sense for them. So you have MS selling a platform, Nintendo, more or less, selling a platform as well, and Sony selling mass market content and locking it to a platform. Or, now, a platform plus one of MS's platforms....

The wildcard here is what the TV streaming companies are doing with exclusives. Disney, Amazon, Netflix, etc. But Google recently demonstrated that games are a lot harder than TV to do exclusives. TV proved exclusives do carry tremendous weight. Yet Google proved the up-front cost involved doesn't make it as good a proposition. Film still costs more money to produce than games, but you can turn around most of a film in a year. Games with their 4-10 year turnaround times is a lot harder to do that with if you don't already have an ecosystem. MS has the money and the will to tie it up because they're already vested. I'm betting Amazon will. Apple kinda does.