Microsoft’s purchase of Bethesda’s parent company Zenimax has been approved

On February 8th the EU officially announced that they are allowing Microsoft to purchase Zenimax, parent company of Bethesda, with no concessions. This means that Microsoft can now officially complete their purchase of Zenimax with no need to worry at all about the purchase breaching competition guidelines.

This also means that Xbox and Bethesda can now start working together on projects. They can also start planning which titles will be exclusive as well as plan which games to bring to game pass and when. This marks a monumental change in the gaming industry as multiple game franchises could now be off limits to PlayStation users including elder scrolls and fallout.

In a blog post released on March 9th Phil Spencer officially confirmed that Zenimax has joined the current portfolio of Xbox Game Studios. In this blog post he also outlined that Xbox consoles, PC and Game Pass will be the best place to play new Bethesda games, he also confirmed that we can expect some games from them in the future to be fully exclusive to Xbox and PC. At the end of the blog post he then confirmed that multiple Bethesda titles will be joining Xbox Game Pass by the end of this week. Multiple rumors have suggested that the titles will be announced in a marketing video being released on Thursday celebrating the successful acquisition of Zenimax.

However, the biggest question still remains to be which titles will be made fully exclusive to the Xbox ecosystem. The most rumored title is Bethesda’s new space RPG Starfield, however I find this unlikely as Bethesda has quite possibly already signed a deal with Sony to publish this game to PlayStation 4 and 5 as well as already spent lots of money on development. Due to this I personally believe that it is more likely to be an unannounced game that will be coming to Xbox as an exclusive.