Microsoft Aquisition of Zenimax Thoughts

It has been a few days and the dust is starting to settle, but on 21st the game world was shocked by the announcement that Microsoft was going to acquire Zenimax the parent company of Bethesda Game Studios. What this practically means is that Microsoft will be the publisher of the Elder Scrolls series, Fallout series, Doom series, Quake series, Wolfenstein series and Dishonored series among others. Bethesda itself has gobbled up a number of studios in a bid to compete with other major second party studios like EA and Ubisoft. It is somewhat uncertain however how this is going to change the calculus of how business is done in Maryland.

The initial concern is of course that this is going to lock Bethesda titles to being exclusive to the Xbox, XCloud and Windows PC platforms. At least in the short term there are a number of games that have already signed contacts for PlayStation timed exclusivity and it seems like those are going through as planned. Immediately this is going to mean is that the Bethesda games will be making their way to XCloud and Game Pass which makes me wonder how exactly something like and Elder Scrolls Online will work in this world. The truth is I am optimistic about this decision because I can’t necessarily say that it has been bad for other studios that have become acquired.

I’m a big fan of the State of Decay series and Undead Labs and for the most part what acquisition has brought is a seeming stability. There are a lot of names that I see associated with that company still all these years later that I talked to in person at Pax South. They’ve become a company with a single franchise unfortunately, but they have done a good job of supporting State of Decay and its sequel without having to load it up with heinous microtransactions and are prepped to bring the third installment to the Xbox Series Whatever. Admittedly they started off as a company on Xbox Live Arcade on the 360 and for the most part have always supported Xbox and Windows PC so it wasn’t likely much of a transition to move to being a first party studio.

Another studio that got gobbled up is Double Fine a studio with a notoriously independent streak. Tim Shafer has talked candidly about this quite a bit and for them it was largely a move for stability once again. Wildly paraphrasing, he has talked about in the past how tight the independent development cycle is and how rough the finances have been and Microsoft represented a huge font of available cash. You can’t acquire a studio like Double Fine without a full realization of just how quirky they are and how unique the products that they make are, so I would like to think that Microsoft is more or less just going to allow them to continue doing their thing.

Microsoft has been on this acquisition spree, gobbling up game studios and then seemingly letting them do their thing. A prime example is the acquisition of Mojang studios and with it Minecraft which brought a massive rewrite of the game that it desperately needed. However this new version doesn’t support the modding capabilities that the original Java client did, but they have seemingly continued supporting the old kludgy mess along with the new hotness. As far as I can tell the only thing they have done is bring a sort of regularity to the update cycle and the churning out of new features. The clients for “rival” consoles have languished a bit but they are trying to join them all together under a shared Bedrock edition. Basically it has not meant the end of Minecraft and I don’t think this acquisition will really change much for the day to day business of making the next generation of Bethesda titles.

This acquisition made sense for Microsoft for a lot of reasons. I have talked about this generation being a battle of business models. Microsoft is going hard on the game pass model and the recent deal with EA Play bringing it to the platform only underlines this point. Game Pass is massive for the players and I went on a whole twitter thread about this the other day. I use the hell out of it to try new things out, and it still floors me that games are available on day one to download and even pre-load ahead of time. Star Wars Squadrons is a huge game that is coming out soon, and I am probably going to wait to play it through the Game Pass because me and flight sim type games don’t often get along. It gives me the opportunity to test something out before I commit to it, which I find myself doing a lot more.

This generation really seems to be defined by Microsoft who are leaning hard into platform as a service with a reoccurring monthly/yearly subscription that unlocks access to a significantly library of games. Sony on the other hand is for the most part pushing a single platform with their own exclusives and the key decision being made is if you go digital or disc with those purchases. Xbox as a platform seems not to care what system you are playing the games on and appears to be supporting console, pc and mobile via xcloud equally well. It is really that last offering that I would love to see them flesh out some more with the addition of clients for other platforms like PC, Mac, and maybe even some consoles like the Nintendo Switch. If I could play my Xbox library on the Switch I would be so freaking into that.

What I wonder however is if all of the Intellectual property that is being gained in the form of Bethesda games is just icing on the cake. Last year at E3 Bethesda introduced that they were working on a new technology called Orion that had the ambiguous goal of making games run better on streaming platforms. The tests that were shown were all involving XCloud and Doom 2016, but the results were supposedly phenomenal. It makes me wonder if this acquisition was at least in part a way to lock down this tech and make it exclusive to Xcloud and serve as a market differentiator between the streaming options. Microsoft is putting a lot of eggs in this basket and it would make sense that they want XCloud to have every advantage possible.

I’ve talked a lot about the potential positives here, but here comes the big negative. I don’t forsee a world where we do not see new Bethesda/Zenimax games coming out exclusively on the Xbox platform which includes Windows PC and mobile via Xcloud. I am not sure if this is going to be a timed exclusive or a true exclusive, but whatever the case something like that is going to happen and you aren’t likely to play Starfield or Elder Scrolls 6 on team blue. Sony has its own stable of first party exclusives and that is the reason why I will probably always own a Sony PlayStation. Does this Bethesda exclusivity negatively impact me? Not really because I will always favor the PC when given an option of how to play my games and Microsoft has shown that they are willing to treat console and PC as equals.

Does this suck a lot for players who are console only and own a PlayStation? Yes, yes it does. Do I think platform exclusivity is a good thing? Not really and I honestly find it pretty freaking annoying. However it has been the rule of the land since the Nintendo Entertainment System era, and I don’t really see that changing any time soon. Do I think Microsoft is finished acquiring companies? Probably not and I think both Sega and Capcom look like potential targets. Capcom is going to be a little awkward to acquire, but the controlling interest is only 22% which seems highly vulnerable to me. For the players however I think the things that Microsoft is offering at the price points they are offering it is deeply compelling. Game Pass is a phenomenal deal for the consumers, but I guess time will tell how good of a deal for the studios it ultimately is.

1 thought on “Microsoft Aquisition of Zenimax Thoughts”

  1. “If I could play my Xbox library on the Switch I would be so freaking into that.”

    Preach! Heck if MS spit out a Switch clone that only played Xcloud games I’d probably buy it. My phone screen is too small for me to play most games comfortably, and if you move to tablet sized then it isn’t as mobile (since it’s really awkward to try to attach a tablet to a controller). The Switch screen is the ideal size.

    A few other thoughts: The Elder Scrolls Online is already on Gamepass Console, tho I’m not sure if it is on Xcloud.

    Also, maybe this was a pre-existing deal, but Wasteland 3 (published by MS) just recently came out on PS4, so I have some hope that MS won’t lock everything to their playing field. OTOH this buying spree was at least in part a response to all the flack MS took from the Xbox not having any good exclusives. So I think it could go either way. Maybe they’ll be Xbox/Windows first, then launch on Team Blue at a later date, like how Sony is starting to bring their exclusives to Windows…eventually (Death Stranding and Horizon Zero Dawn for example).

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