One of the big questions that arose shortly after Microsoft's acquisition of Bethesda was whether the studio's upcoming games would be released on the PlayStation platform. Cutting them off would mean losing a lot of game sales, but it could also have a big impact on Microsoft's big plans: If you like Bethesda's open-world RPGs and they're only available on Xbox, that will probably be a factor when deciding where to spend your money. It will be.

In an interview with Kotaku, Xbox boss Phil Spencer did not say that Microsoft will make Bethesda games console-exclusive on Xbox in the future, but he stressed that it is a possibility. "ElderScrolls6" is a PlayStation When asked if it would be possible to recoup the $7.5 billion spent on the acquisition without selling "ElderScrolls 6" on PlayStation consoles, Spencer answered emphatically, "Yes.

"I don't want to flip on that," he continued. 'This agreement was not made to take the game away from the rest of the player base. Nowhere in the document we put together did it say, 'How can we prevent other players from playing these games? We want more people to be able to play the games, not less people to be able to go play them."

"But I also just directly answered the question you had, in the model, when you think about where people are going to play and the number of devices we had, we have xCloud and PC and Game Pass and our console base, We don't need to ship these games on other platforms other than the ones we support to make the deal work for us. Whatever that means."

Spencer has previously stated that Microsoft will honor existing contracts for the release of PS5, but beyond that will decide which games to put on which hardware on a case-by-case basis. Nor, as Kotaku pointed out, does it have to be an all-or-nothing proposition: Microsoft could, for example, release "The Elder Scrolls 6" (or whatever it is) as a full-priced retail game on PlayStation, while making it available on Xbox Game Pass, while also making it playable on Xbox Game Pass. Microsoft has not indicated a strong leaning one way or the other in its long-term plans for potential console exclusivity, but it is interesting that Spencer is so readily alluding to even that possibility.

While the bulk of the interview focused on Microsoft's upcoming Xbox One S and X consoles, Spencer also noted that there was no new update on the status of Halo Infinite, which was delayed in August, and that the campaign and multiplayer components could be released separately, leaving open the possibility that they will be released separately.