Microsoft buying Zenimax/Bethesda

bethesda games on release day on game pass on pc would be un****ing believable

Xbox is less than 10% of Microsoft's total revenues, making roughly $11.4 billion in Fiscal Year 2019, with Zenimax making €500m in 2019.

along with their stable of games and intellectual property, its a major advert for the new xbox release as everything will be available on game pass, this 7.5bn is looking like a sound investment

Sony must not be too happy with the news

Temptamperu wrote: »

Guess i'm buying an Xbox too

Too play the next Fallout? Think we need an intervention here. You'll thank us in the long run.

RIP Vulkan in any of these IPs.

Gunmonkey wrote: »

Hopefully the first thing MS do is Phil Spencer personally going to every computer in Bethesda and deleting the Gamebyro engine by hand. Why they still use it baffles me when far better engines doing the rounds.

Why they don't use id tech is beyond me.

A shred move by Microsoft and fair play. It deserves a round of applause.

They have bought a company that owns so many relevant gaming ip's and securing them to be Xbox only for the next generation and to game pass. All announced before either next gen console went on sale.

I've read some people think the likes of an elder Scrolls 6 game etc would still come out on ps5 as too much money to be had but I don't see it. Blow your competition away by not releasing it on their platform.

Besides, they've already announced these games for game pass. So even if they had ps5 versions a consumer can be faced with buying a ps5 and forking out 70 euro for elder Scrolls 6 on ps5 or getting it and a ton of other games for 10 euro a month on Xbox.

Lads, Microsoft aren't spending 7 billion to release games for Playstation. The ONLY ones that will be on a Sony console will be the upcoming ones that are already anounced and have deals signed, similar to Wasteland 3 coming to PS4 after inXile was bought my Microsoft.

IMO they'd be mad to turn down the profit that releasing Elder Scrolls or Fallout on PlayStation would bring.

My prediction — and I'd put real money down on this one — is that through Game Pass they'll start offering 'early access' to select games. That early access will be about 2-4 weeks ahead of the physical/digital release dates for each game. All the popular franchises will be available on all platforms, but Game Pass will be by far the most attractive way for a majority of gamers to get those games.

Additionally, a further prediction that I'm less willing to bet on (because there are factors Microsoft can't control at play in this one) — Microsoft will try to make Game Pass a cross-platform thing, and they'll bring the same benefits to every platform it's available on.

The amount of profit they could make from Xbox hardware is dwarfed by the potential profitability of Game Pass. This is what they do with their Surface hardware too — it makes a bit of profit by itself, but the core goal is to drive adoption of Microsoft services.

You can see this exact approach across all of their business units — Azure, GitHub, Windows, Office, etc. The big money is in SaaS, and Gaming as a Service is the next big extension of that.

gizmo wrote: »

idTech was never designed with the kind of fully open-world games Bethesda are known for in mind so it wouldn't have been a good fit historically. The more recent iterations of the engine have included changes which could remedy this somewhat but I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised if they were developing a new engine for the next generation of their games.

That is a good point. I do hope they have either improved there existing engine big time, or they forked idtech for RPGs.

Retr0gamer wrote: »

They'll tell us that it's a brand new engine while the game will stink of gamebryo with a new rendering tech.

Would be nice if they put the time into modifying an existing engine to fit an open world game. I mean the time put it to get it working will be saved in QA.

But why should Bethesda care. Fallout 4 was garbage and still reviewed great despite all the bugs as well on top of it.

Also Bethesda games just plain did not work at all on PS3. The frame rate would slowly tank until they were near unplayable by the 50 hour mark and yet they still got amazing reviews.

Why bother when you can get away with it based on Hype alone.

Exactly, Bethesda haven't made a game that wasn't a total mess in a decade or more, but still seem to be living off hype for their brands. MS would do better to rummage around in their IPs and give them to some of the competent developers in their portfolio.

MJohnston wrote: »

IMO they'd be mad to turn down the profit that releasing Elder Scrolls or Fallout on PlayStation would bring.

It's a long-term move rather than short-term. Microsoft have an enormous war chest behind them. They can easily take the hit on the profits releasing the games on PS5 would bring, because the plan is to buy up more studios and properties, increase their share of the market in terms of consoles and Gamepass subscriptions, and then the future profits of releasing games on PS5 aren't as valuable.

The more studios and franchises they can buy up for Gamepass and take away from Playstation, the more attractive Xbox and Gamepass becomes to Playstation users.

Playstation's strength the past generation has been their first-party studios and their exclusives. MS are now buying up studios and existing franchises not just to compete with Playstation on that aspect, but to boost up what their strength has been lately, which is Gamepass. Sony can't compete on the same level as that as they don't have the funding MS has, even with a much higher market share in terms of consoles.

MS can tank the hit of not releasing those games on Playstations.

New Vegas 2 ????