Microsoft Bought Bethesda To Stop Starfield Becoming A PS5 Exclusive

thegamer.com:

It's day two of Microsoft and the FTC's court battle and, just like the first, it's throwing up some pretty massive revelations and bizarre claims. One of the biggest of today's reveals came from Xbox head Phil Spencer, who has claimed that one of the major reasons behind Microsoft's decision to acquire Bethesda parent company ZeniMax Media was to prevent Starfield from becoming a PS5 exclusive.

Shortly after the studio was acquired, you may recall that titles such as Ghostwire: Tokyo and Deathloop launched as timed PlayStation exclusives despite their developers being owned by Microsoft. That's because Bethesda had previously agreed contracts with Sony for both titles to be exclusive to PlayStation consoles for a year, someting that Microsoft was extremely concerned could happen with Starfield as well.

Related: Starfield Running At 30fps Is The Right Choice

Instead of waiting for PlayStation to take Starfield off of Xbox systems, Microsoft decided to acquire Bethesda and take Starfield for itself. It's likely that Microsoft had more reasons than just Starfield's potential PlayStation exclusivity, as it managed to scoop up a number of other talented studios at the same time, but Spencer has claimed it was a big driving force behind the decision.

"Zenimax is a great example," says Spencer. "When we acquired Zenimax, one of the impetus for that was that Sony had done a deal for Deathloop and Ghostwire and effectively paid Bethesda to not ship those games on Xbox. So, the discussion about Starfield when we heard that Starfield is potentially also gonna end up skipping Xbox was that we can't be in a position as a third place console [and be even] farther behind..."

We can glean a couple of things from this quote, the first