Microsoft Owns Bethesda Now I Guess. So What's Next.

september 21st 2020 i awoke in a cold sweat something was different my cat stared at me for a brief time before lightly biting me on the nose as always i reached for my telecommunications device my cellular phone so to speak and began my daily regimen of checking the rss feeds on my shitty website as i scrolled through the news something caught my eye words that when red formed the following phrase microsoft has bought bethesda world's a collider so yeah as you've probably heard microsoft bought bethesda well not just bethesda but all of zenimax so yeah they got the fallouts they got the elder scrolls the doom the wolfenstein the quakes and a whole lot more it is a big deal not just for microsoft's xbox division but any fan of bethesda's very popular franchises it also offers interesting insights into the mind of a trillion dollar company given the history with these sort of acquisitions i wouldn't blame you if you felt pretty anxious hearing the news i mean when a company gets bought out it's never the same again and considering the history of blizzard and activision and everything ea has ever bought yeah there's some precedent to be scared but at the same time this specific situation might be a bit different originally i was just going to write a twitter thread about it or something but it wasn't long before i realized just how many variables are at play so yeah i just want to take a look at what all of this means why it shouldn't be all that surprising what it could mean for the future of bethesda xbox and you microsoft is a veteran in the war of gaming acquisitions unless you're nintendo just creating studios in properties that sell systems is not an easy task so instead most companies just buy new friends in the past microsoft has bought maybe a developer or a franchise here and there it started with bungie of course and then they surprised the world with rare and after that though things got kind of quiet rare seemed underutilized and the acquisition wasn't that well received by the public beyond the few smaller dev studios microsoft did not seem that interested in acquiring the rights to anything else which i mean makes sense microsoft is a big ass corporation and they didn't need this specific game console to succeed throwing all of their money at the wall could just be a poor investment so yeah you start to see some ip stagnation and this lasted for a while during the xbox one days they managed to get the rights to gears from epic they got state of decay and the rise of strategy series as well but i'm sure most of the players of these games already assumed microsoft owned them i mean they were only on those platforms but what really surprised people the big kahuna was when microsoft bought the indie mega hit minecraft minecraft was more or less the biggest game on the planet so this 2.5 billion dollar price tag seemed pretty reasonable question was what's gonna happen to the minecraft the general expectation when a publisher acquires a developer or a franchise is that this becomes an exclusive something that will never leave the ecosystem that's set up when sony buys a naughty dog the naughty dog is not going to make jack x for the xbox you feel me but minecraft kinda was too big for this tactic shutting down access to playstation and any other platforms beyond the microsoft realms would not look too good in the public's eyes and it could have very well tainted the entire legacy of this game i mean it's not going to be too easy to just make back that 2.5 billion dollars if you're limiting who can buy the product usually and since then it's been uh business as usual you know you got the same platforms the same updates maybe a spin-off but in 2018 microsoft seemed to get a bit more serious their game pass service made exclusives kind of matter again pass is a monthly download subscription service thing you pay the money you get the games and sure they could temporarily buy the rights to any game they want and put it on the platform but that's expensive and again it doesn't last forever microsoft wanted studios to make more games and so they bought a lot of them playground who made forza horizon ninja theory compulsion undead labs in exile and even obsidian were now under the microsoft umbrella that's a lot of big names in there and this expanded even further to include double fine but none of these acquisitions were gonna make the biggest waves anyway microsoft has a lot more money a lot more money than even just for this if they're going to go all in they could and they did now throughout 2020 it's been rumored that microsoft was prepared to drop the big bucks on somebody the question though was who we've seen rumors from a bungee acquisition that sure would have made the headlines but the actual management of this shaky franchise might have been more trouble than it was worth wb games would have gotten them plenty of studios and properties albeit many that mostly make wb franchises anyway the owners of the company realized it did actually have value so that didn't go through but it turned out to be none of these the zenimax acquisition came out of nowhere in the price tag seems reasonable at least to me maybe xenomax's library is pretty grand doom is a game of the year contender they have one of the most acclaimed backlogs of any publishing firm and of course they have bethesda any fan of rpgs and bad consumer practices can tell you that bethesda is a big deal they have highly acclaimed games that sell millions upon millions of copies and then they do stuff like this and this in this constant mismanagement greed and seemingly ineptitude have left the company's image in ruins in recent years but no matter what you think of them you gotta admit these games sell in this popularity it gets us to the most obvious reason of why microsoft acquired zenimax in the first place the game pass game pass subscriptions are up 50 percent in six months an absurd rate of growth investing in a backlog that includes the skyrims and the dooms and the wolfensteins well it does make sense it'll bring more people to this specific service right and that matters because each game pass subscription costs about 10 a month even more if you have the ultimate version for both pc and the xbox with the reported 15 million subscribers that means game pass is bringing in roughly 1 billion 800 million a year to microsoft now given the grand scale of this corporation i can see how one might think this isn't all that important but remember the key factor of growth microsoft is a widely diversified company they make the most popular operating system on the planet they make the office suite and business products and their cloud services is their most profitable segment but xbox while it used to be a footnote is now kinda essential during the pandemic xbox popularity surged and that growth just keeps going on now sadly it's incredibly hard to find exact numbers on xbox sales and revenue and finding the cost of running the division yeah microsoft is not good at reporting the stuff it's entirely possible if the rate of success keeps going the xbox brand could be just as important to microsoft as well any of this in fact it probably already is because it has that growth coupled with insane potential think about how microsoft standard business works an operating system cost you like a hundred dollars and once you buy it you're pretty much done maybe in a couple years yet you might have to do it again but most companies don't like to upgrade to the new software and the new hardware too often which means growth is you know not the best games however could be a constant stream of income and growth and so it makes sense that microsoft started seeing this as an incredibly valuable asset which is why microsoft spent all this money and why they've said they'll probably spend even more but even considering all this it would be odd to purchase bethesda just for its library to hit game pass first off zedemax had several highly acclaimed studios some of which are tied to specific franchises in games for the time being now on a basic level this means more studios can play around with microsoft's ip library such as in the vein of playground games working on fable does that mean that arcane is gonna get shoved into making gears of war sploopal-d-bump or some [ __ ] like that probably not but it could still happen now pete hines lead architect of the pete hines project had a blog post recently that indicated bethesda will stay bethesda but i don't believe for a second that microsoft won't be allowed to mix and match as they please another major aspect is the technology they've acquired whereas the creation engine might be total garbage in tech is still top of the line stuff and integrating that into microsoft's other ips could prove useful in the future in some alternate universe where this acquisition happened years ago i wouldn't be surprised if halo infinite ran off of retooled id tech 7 engine now of course the property i'm talking doom i'm talking quake i'm talking hover tank 3d now these properties they're important not only because bethesda can make bethesda games and it can make id games but microsoft could decide to let other studios make games in these ips as well they could they could remake old games they could do all that instances anything anything's possible in this grand glorious future but does this actually matter to people well maybe that depends on whether they're exclusives or not now while we know many of the sony partnerships will still be honored it's entirely possible and likely that down the line bethesda games become xbox and pc in the cloud app thing only sony reportedly wanted to make starfield a timed exclusive to the ps5 before all this happened considering sony's willingness to buy up rights to a number of massive franchises giving a middle finger to well everyone that's not sony i wouldn't be too surprised if microsoft returned the favor so while maybe some games will come to the ps5 i don't expect this day one i i just don't i don't think microsoft would just come out and say elder scrolls 6 is only gonna be on the xbox because that would just get him bad pr todd the todd howard posted a blog about this acquisition and his phrasing heavily implies that right now bethesda games will be non-exclusive to the xbox but then again are we gonna take anything todd howard says seriously anymore yeah microsoft let minecraft run free and cuphead go to the switch and even ori in the little owl thing but these are this and this is something else even rare replay never left the xbox most of the xbox games go to pc sure but they're still on a microsoft platform the only place you can play halo outside the reach of microsoft is the original mac release and uh this arcade unit i guess and the atari actually some of you may be wondering if xbox is so important to microsoft right now if sony is playing just as dirty as dirty gets why doesn't phil spencer just go scorched earth on the competition why don't they just give the finger to sony and take just take it all remove bethesda games from other storefronts cackle in the golden vaults of microsoft's cloud server facilities well because they don't want to kill sony microsoft has been in binds before over monopolistic practices and i'm sure they wouldn't want to get into something like this but also sony pays microsoft for cloud usage their most profitable venture so again they don't really hate each other i mean beyond all the marketing talk the upcoming consoles are nearly identical even more so than in the past as microsoft said they see the real competition in google in amazon i used to think that was you know just hyping up their cloud platform and saying this is the future not this but now that i think about it yeah these are the real threats microsoft has a lot of money but so do these guys google could buy ea activision nintendo and even sony all at once and not even blink they could go from this to owning everything as quickly as they really want to amazon could launch a cloud gaming service to all prime members for free both google and amazon have shown interest in the gaming market but they never went all in and if they wanted to they have enough money to make [ __ ] happen fast sony and nintendo are not so if we see a future where this happens and it's a three-way race between google amazon and microsoft for your gaming needs a future where sony and nintendo are gone all of their properties bought up by various trillion dollar conglomerates microsoft would be wise to not burn those bridges between you and them this is a real possibility in 10 20 years but also microsoft wants to look like the good guy and there's a reason for this xbox is not on top in consoles sales it never has been and when you're losing a business you gotta win people over you can't rest on success on branding because somebody else has the upper hand already in this sense microsoft has been chugging out pro-consumer moves like i've never seen before in making everyone else look pretty bad in the process you can bet your ass though that you know xbox starts winning the whole whoa we're all in trouble which is why i hope i truly hope that this acquisition does help the people who play these games bethesda games now the reason i have hope that this can change is because microsoft did something different they took the most important game of a console's launch one with marketing already in place sponsored deals and money on the line a system seller and delayed it to an unspecified time the following year that is absurd to me and the only reason they did this is because they have the money to do so now what does this have to do with bethesda you see using this basis i can't imagine microsoft would allow bethesda to launch another broken title at least two broken because now it would reflect badly on microsoft whereas bethesda had no qualms with its bad image before microsoft is not willing to take the hit not anymore at least larger funding for games is great less crunch is great and accountability actual accountability will be great hopefully well that's that's all we can really do actually is hope because the actual acquisition might not happen until late 2021 and while we might see some of the effects coming in quick and fast we still don't know what happens to all of this in a few decades it's gonna be a simple novelty that at some point bethesda and microsoft were two separate entities you know one final note i want to point out that now quake 64 is a microsoft owned game which means they both own the best fps of all time and the most overrated fps of all time come at me [ __ ] [Music] you

Channel: KnowledgeHub

Views: 241,743

Rating: 4.928134 out of 5

Keywords: KnowledgeHub, Xbox, Microsoft Bethesda, Microsoft Buys Bethesda, Microsoft Buys Zenimax, Microsoft, Xbox Buys Bethesda, Microsoft Buys Fallout, Microsoft Buys Elder Scrolls, Knowledge Microsoft, Microsoft KnowledgeHub, Doom, PSV, Next Gen, Zenimax, Bethesda, Skyrim, Fallout, Microsoft Owns Bethesda, Bethesda Microsoft Exclusive

Id: FKvdfgEmmOM

Length: 17min 20sec (1040 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 28 2020