Xbox Hints It Bought Bethesda To Lock Down Starfield PS5 Console Exclusivity

At the beginning of the generation, there were rumors that Sony was acting incredibly aggressively, trying to sign console exclusives with as many publishers as possible. Ultimately, we’ve seen evidence of that, with people like death loop, Ghostwire Tokyoand more recently final fantasy 16 they all launch first on PS5.

And in the FTC’s ongoing court case against Microsoft, as it seeks Temporarily halting the trillion-dollar tech titan’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard for $69 billionTalkative Xbox executive Phil Spencer alleged that one of his company’s motivations for buying Bethesda was to prevent Sony from securing console exclusivity in star field.

“When we acquired (Bethesda’s parent company) Zenimax, one of the impulses was that Sony had made a deal for Deathloop and Ghostwire: Tokyo and effectively paid Bethesda not to release those games on Xbox, so the discussion about Starfield when we heard that it would potentially end up skipping Xbox as well if we can’t be in a position as a third-place console where we fall further behind.” he said.

Spencer didn’t bring any receipts, so it’s unclear what kind of information her company was acting on, though seeing that This isn’t the first time we’ve heard this story.it is probably safe to assume that Sony really was in negotiations over console exclusivity for Starfield. Assuming the deal was the same or similar to Deathloop and Ghostwire: Tokyo, it probably would have been one-year timed console exclusivity.

Of course, after the purchase of the publisher by Microsoft for 7,500 million dollars, the game never release on PlayStation at all now, and neither will any of the other Bethesda games, like indiana jones. We’ll let you decide which is the lesser of the two evils; Either way, it’s interesting to hear the Redmond firm’s motivation for the purchase.