Will Activision Blizzard games be Xbox exclusive? Look at history

digitaltrends.com:

Microsoft is acquiring Activision Blizzard, and that’s a massive deal. That’s not hyperbole — it is literally the biggest acquisition in gaming history, totaling $68.7 billion.

But it’s also a massive deal for players, and not just on Xbox or PC, but also on PlayStation. Because once this acquisition closes in 2023 and Microsoft has the reins of Activision Blizzard, you can expect a solid number of the publisher’s IPs to become console exclusive.

And yes, I do mean Call of Duty too.

If you’re reading this in horror, mouth agape, thinking to yourself “no, Microsoft can’t do this” well, do I have some bad news for you: It can, and it has done this exact same thing before. Recall Microsoft’s acquisition of ZeniMax Media back in 2020. It was a simpler time, when we thought a $7.5 billion acquisition was massive. But immediately following it, players had the same concerns. Could Microsoft take Bethesda’s games and make them exclusive to Xbox consoles?

For a while, Phil Spencer left that question up in the air. In a blog post, he wrote that “some new titles in the future” will be exclusive to Xbox and PC players. Of course, “some” is the keyword there, and it left room for PlayStation players to hope. It meant that maybe, just maybe, the next Elder Scrolls or Fallout game would head to every platform, just like they had when Bethesda wasn’t a first-party studio.

That was then shot down when Spencer did an interview with GQ, in which he said that both Starfield and The Elder Scrolls VI would be exclusive to Xbox and PC. Bethesda’s senior vice president of global communications, Pete Hines, could do nothing but apologize if fans were “unhappy or pissed or whatever,” in an interview with GameSpot. He immediately followed that