2023-07-14 13:04:20
The information obtained in recent months about the video game business could never have come out without the antitrust regulatory authorities looking into the subject. And today are sales of Starfield and Indiana Jones in question.
Starfield was supposed to be released on PS5
It’s no longer a secret that Bethesda had planned to release Starfield and Indiana Jones on PS5 before the publisher was acquired by Microsoft in the spring of 2021. Bethesda then claimed that a PS5 release would have complicated development, but the boss of Xbox had gone further.
During the hearings with the FTC and the American court on the acquisition of Activision by Microsoft, Phil Spencer explained that Sony strongly coveted Bethesda games to make them PlayStation exclusives. Ghostwire: Tokyo and Deathloop are also very good examples, and Microsoft therefore decided to buy Bethesda/Zenimax to “secure content” on its platform.
When we acquired ZeniMax, one of the reasons for the acquisition was that Sony made a deal for Deathloop and Ghostwire…to pay Bethesda not to ship those games to the Xbox
[…]
So when we learned that Starfield was potentially going to zap Xbox as well, we couldn’t find ourselves in a position where, as a third-tier console, we would be even further behind in terms of content ownership, and so we had to secure the content to stay viable in this industry
Needless to say, seeing a game like Starfield go exclusively to PlayStation would have been another blow for Microsoft at a time when Xbox was often blamed for not having enough exclusive games on its platform.
Microsoft misses 10 million sales on PS5
Also during the court hearings with the FTC, it is the testimony of Tim Stuart, chief financial officer of Xbox, which sheds light on what Bethesda was considering at the time. He said that Microsoft had forecast 10 million PlayStation sales for “Starfield and Indiana Jones” before finally making them exclusive.
If Microsoft ultimately didn’t, it’s because the company felt that the exclusivity of these two games would be more beneficial to Xbox, whether in terms of game sales or Xbox Game Pass subscriptions.
As a reminder, Starfield will be available on September 6, 2023 on Xbox and PC. For its part, Indiana Jones has been announced on Xbox and PC, but the game does not yet have a release date.
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