It’s day two ofMicrosoftand 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 fromXboxhead Phil Spencer, who has claimed that one of the major reasons behind Microsoft’s decision to acquireBethesdaparent company ZeniMax Media was to preventStarfieldfrom 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 ChoiceInstead of waiting forPlayStationto 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 being that it seems like Bethesda may have planned to release Starfield on PlayStation before Microsoft came along and bought up the studio, though we’ll never know how far along those plans actually were. Microsoft has a proven habit of canning the PlayStation versions of games that were in development before the acquisition,the first being Redfalland the second beingMachineGames' upcoming Indiana Jones title.
Secondly, it suggests that Microsoft is more than happy to buy up existing studios for exclusives if it thinks it can help close the gap between Xbox and PlayStation, with Spencer seemingly trying to further drive home the fact that Xbox isn’t as competitive in the industry as its biggest rival. Whether or not this argument will help Microsoft’s case remains to be seen, but it’s clear that the company needs Starfield to be a success.
