Enlarge / Bethesda’s logo as carried by the publisher’s growing roster of mascots. (credit: Sam Machkovech)
Bethesda Softworks and its parent company Zenimax Media are now officially a part of Microsoft, less than six months after the $7.5 billion proposed acquisition was announced. That means plans for “some new [Bethesda] titles in the future that will be exclusive to Xbox and PC players,” Microsoft announced this morning.
It’s still unclear how many Bethesda games will be exclusive to Microsoft’s platforms going forward, or if those titles will come from the studio’s well-established franchises such as The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Doom, Wolfenstein, Dishonored, Prey, and the The Evil Within. But Microsoft says additional current Bethesda Softworks games will be coming to Xbox Game Pass later this week, joining current subscription offerings including Skyrim, The Elder Scrolls Online, Doom Eternal, Wolfenstein: Youngblood, Dishonored 2, Fallout: New Vegas, and Fallout 76.
Reading the tea leaves
In recent months, Microsoft had offered some broad hints that Bethesda would still continue to publish games on competing platforms from Sony and Nintendo (as Microsoft-owned Mojang continues to do with the Minecraft franchise). Microsoft CFO Tim Stuart said in November that he expected Bethesda games would launch “first or better or best” on Microsoft’s own gaming platforms, and that the company doesn’t “have intentions of just pulling all of Bethesda content out of Sony or Nintendo or otherwise.”
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