Phil Spencer: Xbox could recoup Bethesda acquisition without PlayStation releases

“We have xCloud and PC and Game Pass and our console base. I don’t have to go ship those games on any other platform other than the platforms that we support in order to kind of make the deal work for us.”

- Xbox head Phil Spencer muses on hypothetical exclusivity in a chat with Kotaku.

Xbox’s $7.5 billion acquisition of Bethesda-parent ZeniMax media created a lot of questions about where each studios future releases would show up.

While Xbox has since said it’ll decide platforms for future ZeniMax titles on a case-by-case basis, Xbox head Phil Spencer has offered a reminder that its business would be perfectly fine if the next big Elder Scrolls title skipped over PlayStation and launched as an Xbox console exclusive.

Speaking in a recent interview with the folks at Kotaku, Spencer responds with a firm “yes” when asked if it is possible for the company to recoup that $7.5 billion investment without that next big Elder Scrolls release ever glancing at PlayStation again.

This isn’t to say that Xbox plans to lock every single Bethesda or ZeniMax game into Xbox exclusivity however, but Spencer remains confident that doing so wouldn’t leave them in a tough spot.

“I don’t want to be flip about that.This deal was not done to take games away from another player base like that,” Spencer tells Kotaku as part of a larger interview on Xbox's future plans. “Nowhere in the documentation that we put together was: ‘How do we keep other players from playing these games?’ We want more people to be able to play games, not fewer people to be able to go play games.”

“But I’ll also say in the model—I’m just answering directly the question that you had—when I think about where people are going to be playing and the number of devices that we had, and we have xCloud and PC and Game Pass and our console base,I don’t have to go ship those games on any other platform other than the platforms that we support in order to kind of make the deal work for us. Whatever that means. ”