Microsoft to acquire ZeniMax Media and Bethesda Softworks for $7.5B (opens in new tab)

Sure, if you ate McDonald's every day you'd probably think that there are no good restaurants anymore.

My top 4 games by playtime in the last few years were Rimworld, Oxygen Not Included, Dwarf Fortress and WoW Classic. Honorable mentions go to Spelunky and Stellaris. It's to everyone's great regret that a single one of these titles was purchased by one of the shitty publishers you mentioned, fortunately it's the one that's on its last legs.

FWIW Ubisoft is very hostile to being acquired.

I worked there for 6-7 years and the CEO fought off vivendis acquisition. Which was not the first.

He has even gone so far as to decentralise the Canadian studios so that if the company was somehow acquired the aquirer could not close down studios without heavy fines from the Canadian government.

Unity just had its IPO, and the technology is powering a huge fraction of games across all platforms, from recent hit Fall Guys to Pokemon Go, to thousands of indie efforts, not to mention wide adoption in both the AR software industry and as a platform for many AI research projects. I don't know what its financial future will be as the company has been focusing on growth over profit, but it's a significant player.

Tangentially, open-source game engine Godot keeps getting better and better, and it's just a matter of time before a significant game is made using its tools: https://godotengine.org/

There are more: - paradox interactive - rockstar, which is strong from gta v online and rdr - cd projeckt red, which also get income from gog and hyped cyberpunk - valve won't exit software devs in short time, their investment in vr is big. I won't be surprised if they release vanity knives with lootbox though

IMO Bethesda decided to sell to MS because their recent games cannot generate enough popularity. They can only hoped for skyrim and are struggling with their old engine.

If Epic is successful in their lawsuit against Apple, then I think it's only a matter of time before the consoles will have to allow alternate stores as well.

The hardware-is-sold-at-a-loss argument that people like to use to defend closed console stores isn't as convincing when the console makers also own the biggest money making game studios as well.

Go Epic, go!

I was expecting you to finish with valve pivoting to hats.

We still have large, amazing, original games coming out of small studios. Kingdom Come: Deliverance is an excellent example.

We may get to a point where there are practically no "medium-large" developers and only "massive" ones like Microsoft, but I'm confident we'll still get great games from outside the massive groups.

In just a generation we will have our own version of zaibutsu and chaebols, isn't that exciting !

Nintendo is self-sustainable, Apple is exerting a lot of influence among smaller studios with Arcade. Like Annapurna Interactive (which is nota bene funded by Oracle).

As long as no one buys From Software everything will be ok. Praise the Sun.

The barrier between what indie studios and big studios can produce is increasingly shrinking. I'd say the market has never been healthier. The sheer amount of content is still constrained by some linear function of man hours but there's enough crowdsourcing business models like kickstarter and early access releases that even small shops can afford to show a cool concept and get funded for its completion.

Don't forget Tencent.

If you think Valve will exit software development, then you don't understand the market. Valve did do that and had this luxury when they were the only big game platform on PC. Unfortunately for them, there's GOG, EPIC, and MS Game Pass now. They need exclusives and the best way to do that without going the EPIC route is by developing their own games.

A lot of people claim that this is reducing competition but the gaming industry seems to be much less consolidated than many others.

I don't think it's fair to include Microsoft in that list. They buy game studios so they can close them and shelve their IP after several attempts to turn beloved franchises into GAAS products. They're less of a game studio conglomerator and more of a recycling bin.

Godot, Blender, itch.io, Krita. Nobody forces you to use walled gardens. Games are entertainment, not something mandatory, so I wouldn't worry too much. If there's too much of an lock-in from the major vendors, it will simply cause the indie scene to explode.

How did you leave out Nintendo? :(

Ouch! This cuts deep because of how close to actual future it sounds. Especially

> Valve will quietly exit software development altogether, and pivot to building custom vanity knives using their hardware manufacturing experience.

I think Sega is also a major player, they have bought up many studios in recent years including Relic, Creative Assembly and Amplitude.

That's how every maeket works, sooner or later, things will be in a few hands.

At least indoe games still have a chance. (among us for example)

I find that funny when Among Us (indie) and Fall Guys (also indie) are some of the highest-trending games at the moment.

Microsoft and EA have some deal now revolving around Game Pass Ultimate which grants you access to EA Play also.

Probably missing the largest gaming company in the world Tencent here. I believe they will still thrive.

Bobby Kotick is on Jeffrey Epstein's list. He also lost a sexual harassment case against a flight attendant from one of his private flights.

Miss Ukraine 1996 married Bobby Kotick's dad, Charles Kotick (for 2 years, before he passed away).

Where can I preorder the butterfly cloud9 knife?

>Soon we'll just have Microsoft, Epic, and a conglomeration of EA, Activision, and Ubisoft

And, you know, all the other independent developers. Of which there are a legion.

Embrace, extend, extinguish but for games!

Lol, you're probably not far off :D

The fact that Zenimax corporate, and likely some unknown exec in that machine, had a long standing grudge against John Carmack made me loose so much respect for them. I may not always agree with Carmack from what I've read on twitter (he works for Facebook now) but I have the utmost respect for him, his transparency in his key note lectures, and his supremely engineering focused priorities. His leadership at id Software led to open sourcing of game engines and building modding support in all their titles. This openness and community building became a trend in the PC gaming industry though the 90s and 2000s and ushered a creative golden age that jumpstarted many game development studios and careers. It seems like Zenimax took whatever excitement those early days of PC gaming generated and started extracting consumer dollars with over-produced sequels that treated PCs like another console. They were able to make much more money, but we all came out intellectually impoverished in my opinion.

Carmack left Zenimax because they wanted him to work on sequels instead of VR. They only started caring about VR once the $2B Oculus acquisition was dangled in their faces, and then scrambled to find a way to get a slice that they didn't earn.

I didn't buy DOOM because I didn't support Zenimax's cynical lawsuit/cash grab. Maybe now I'll get DOOM after the Microsoft acquisition closes.

Interesting, didn't Rage pioneer the on-demand texture streaming approach? It fits well with the DMA SSDs in the coming console generation.

Wow, that's now a decade ago.

No Microsoft game has monetization as bad as Fallout 76. So whatever Bethesda does from now on can't be worse than what it does today. ;)

ID tech is one of the biggest Vulkan users. I really hope they don't port it to Directx 12 instead :(

Reading this the second time, I think it might be one of the best "we're being acquired by X" announcements I've ever read. Excited but restrained, and it acknowledges (somewhat implicitly, but still) that there's going to be _quite a bit_ of trepidation in Bethesda's fanbase over the change.

"WHEN THE HELL WILL YOU TELL ME ABOUT STARFIELD?" and the rest of that paragraph actually fills me with a pretty high degree of confidence that this will go well. That, and Nadella-era Microsoft's surprisingly good track record in recent acquisitions.

> Also this allows them to bring the ID tech engine under their stewardship.

It doesn't have to be id tech, but can they make Todd Howard use some other engine than whatever Gamebryo monstrosity Bethesda Softworks been using for 20 years?

There's no way they could trash any franchise worse than Bethesda has trashed Fallout.

This is right of nose and defines exactly why MSFT pivoted to the Game Pass strategy - there were no console-moving titles (besides Sea of Thieves, that game rocks)

What we could see now is these games coming to Game Pass early, or even getting Xbox exclusive content. Theres a low chance they dont drop on other platforms (Skyrim on your Windows phone?) but still a big chip for MSFT to have on hand.

>Also this allows them to bring the ID tech engine under their stewardship....

I'm surprised that isnt more commented on here. Everyone is focused on creative IP. Owning id Tech 6 is or should be a play against Epic, Unity, Crytek etc. 1-4 were open source, and ZeniMax clamped down 5-6. I can see Microsoft marketing id Tech's long open source history, and transforming it into an Amazon Lumberyard competitor.

That hasn't been true for a while now. Xbox Game Studios has acquired Rare, Obsidian, Double Fine, Ninja Theory, Mojang...

Yup, I have the same feeling. I've had an Xbox since the Xbox 360 days:

Xbox 360 -> Xbox One S -> Xbox One X

But, looking at the different showcases. Definitely getting a PS5 this time. I don't do many multi-player games and actually enjoy story based single player games. Looking forward to play God of War, Unchartered, Spider Man, etc.

Maybe this will give Microsoft the boost they need to make some fun next gen games.

If I am not mistaken they have some few PS5 exclusives under development. Is there any new IP that Bethesda is working on, which can be potentially a Xbox/PC exclusive?

Microsoft doesn't care about exclusives that much, imo. Sure, a few here and there, but overall they just want people to use their software. That's why their new "exclusive" titles are also on Xbox One. Microsoft will make money by selling their Bethesda titles to PlayStation users, etc. They might make a few of their titles exclusive, but Fallout and Doom won't be among them.

Isn't Minecraft a bigger game than anything Sony makes? It's owned by Microsoft but isn't an xbox exclusive.

Normally I would 100% agree, but the barrier for entry is so low that I'm not sure that consolidation in the video game market. There are plenty of issues which plague the video game market (software ownership rights, anti-competitive exclusivity deals, workforce abuse, literal gambling for children, pre-order "culture", etc), but I don't think this is one of them.

That said, I don't know if this is necessarily a good thing either. Strictly as a video game publisher, Microsoft has been doing pretty well for themselves over the last five years. They've definitely stood out as one of the more consumer-friendly publishers, but the market is full of notoriously bad publishers (Bethesda included) so being one of the better ones isn't very praiseworthy.

Microsoft also has their own jaded publishing history which includes some pretty bad moves at the end of the 360 generation and beginning of the Xbox One generation. The Kinect was a very high-profile failure. The original Xbox One was met with a strong backlash for lacking support for physical media. They played a significant role in the integration of "microtransactions" into full priced video games. Although they have done many great things over the last few years, I'm still weary of them as a publisher.

I think the jury is still out on whether this is a net positive for the video game market, but it will definitely make the upcoming console generation very interesting.

For now I think we'll wait and see; while the big companies slowly poison the well with microtransactions and live services, ruining games to push for sales, the indie market is massive, turning single developers pottering around in their proverbial basements into millionaires and spawning franchises left and right.

I mean Minecraft started off like that. Terraria is following behind it. Among Us, a $4 game on Steam released in 2018, suddenly became a meme and huge out of nowhere. Fall Guys, made by a small studio that mainly did web, Flash, Facebook and mobile games for most of their existence, came out of left field and created the top game of last month, which (if played right) is an instant brand because of their simple yet infinitely customizable cute characters.

There is still real competition because the big publishers cannot stop the small developers.

What makes you believe this is a consolidation of power? Some of these companies may not be able to survive a long term recession.

While statements like these are common when mergers/buyouts happen, the final decision down the line will not be his to make. Not saying that things will not happen as he states, but it shouldn't be seen as a certainty.

This is a typical, vague PR statement that can mean anything and nothing at all.

Microsoft has decided that all their exclusives will also come to PC anyway. So Windows, Xbox consoles and Xcloud (streaming service) are a given.

This doesn't promise in any way that games will come to PlayStation.

From now until acquisition, the language internally will be 'we have our own identity within Microsoft' and then 3 to 6 months later, there will be these offhand remarks from senior management about how nameless other employees are confused about their place in the company. Then within 1 year, there will be an email about how the CEO has decided to eleviate the confusion among the staff and unite the company under one name. And that name surely won't be Bethesda.

I don't read that as saying Bethesda Games aren't going to be exclusives. Or maybe it'll be xbox plus windows. Meanwhile, there's this quote from Satya Nadella from press release at the bottom of OP, speaking about this acquisition:

> Quality differentiated content is the engine behind the growth and value of Xbox Game Pass—from Minecraft to Flight Simulator.

"Differentiated content" sounds to me like exclusives.

Todd has zero power to make that promise. In my opinion it’s irresponsible to make the claim.

This reminds how the Oculus founder said that logging into Facebook to hop on VR would never be required.

I believe that he is talking about diversity of Microsoft's platforms here and nothing else.

Specifically:

> Regardless of the screen size, the controller, or your ability to even use one.

"your ability to even use one" is clearly a reference to Xbox Adaptive Controller

That's merely rhetoric. Reading between the lines, it's clear Howard is saying "we're going to release Skyrim on XBox Series X on launch day".

Ask Fallout fans what they think of Todd Howard and how he disrespected gamers through the launch of Fallout 76. Better yet see it in full comedic affect in an internet historian video [1].

[1]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kjyeCdd-dl8

You're right. They won't be just on Xbox. They'll be on Xbox and Windows 10.

In other news, the only 3D API that matters now for gaming is DirectX. Which was kinda always the case, except now OpenGL and VK fanboys can't go "but... idTech!"

>Bethesda Games are not going not be exclusive to Xbox

The biggest problem that Microsoft has with the Xbox is lack of AAA exclusives. If the next Elder Scrolls game is going to be released for Xbox and PS5 - what's the point of this exercise?

They will definitely also release on Windows PCs. But that meaningless corporate speak doesn't really confirm that they will stay true multi-platform and release games on PlayStation and Switch as well.

I don’t know why anyone would think Microsoft would be against publishing on competing platforms. Minecraft is available on Switch and PlayStation. It’s all about that $$$

> Bethesda Games are not going not be exclusive to Xbox -- Confirmed by Todd Howard

eh, I read this as games will still come out on PC and probably the odd token Nintendo switch release here and there.

I doubt there will be PS5 releases of Bethedsa games.

They wouldn't; most of their games are PC games first and foremost, with ports to other platforms. Sometimes painfully complicated ports, like Skyrim's to the PS3 (due to memory constraints).

Exclsuive to Xbox doesn't make sense given what Microsoft's strategy these days but games might be exclusive to Xbox and Microsoft Store on Windows.

Given how many times Todd has lied it went back on his word, I don’t put any weight in anything he has to say.

With Doom and Quake, it would be a shock if that were the case.

No way this stands

> 7 years later Bungie left microsoft as its own company again. (not sure how that happened.

My guess is Microsoft got to keep what it really wanted, the Halo brand.

By 2007 Bungie had been fully absorbed into Microsoft. Microsoft retained the rights to Halo and held a minority stake in the "new" Bungie, LLC. I assume by 2007 any vesting periods were over and MS came to a mutual agreement with the Bungie shareholders to allow them to spin off.

Also note they Microsoft mismanaged the Halo property royally. The most recent failure the delay of Halo Infinite, that allegedly has been in development for over 4 years and will miss the launch of the new Xbox console due to poor quality. Microsoft also run Rare almost into irrelevancy after the acquisition. Not the greatest track record there.

I think you severely underestimate the piles of money Nintendo is sitting on if you don't think they'll make it to 2040. Sony is also big enough, diverse enough, and well-established enough that I doubt they would have trouble weathering one or two bad console generations back-to-back.

And let's not forget 2K, 505 Games, Chucklefish, Bandai Namco, Capcom, Deep Silver, Devolver Digital, EA, Epic Games, Focus Home, Gearbox, Koei Tecmo, Paradox, Sega, Stardock, Square Enix, Take-Two, Team17, THQ Nordic, Valve, Warner Bros, and hundreds of other publishers that I can't even begin to list here.

2040 is definitely too soon for the dystopian future you're talking about. Maybe 2042.

I'm sure Disney will be there too. After they acquired Star Wars it's been a looming presence ready to swallow and regurgitate forever any entertainment properties.

I mean this is the future described in Cyberpunk novels. United States of Coca Cola, Republic of Microsoft. Mega Corporations will replace states in an era of neocorporatism (AKA something else...), that's inevitable.

2040 huh? I'd have guessed Tencent (incl subsidies Facebook, Oracle, Microsoft, in order of acquisition) and Alphabet Activision share the market 75%/25%, with Apple still commanding a 30% sales tax in certain spaces.

Where's Sony/Playstation in this?

Speaking of punk and non-AAA, I'll throw in Frostpunk. Now, speaking of winter survivals (and non-AAA), The Long Dark is also a masterpiece.

Paradox isn’t exactly an indie

> Crusader Kings III

Excellent game that is actually on GamePass right now. Microsoft has actually been really great to smaller/indie games with GamePass.

I'm not sure why we can't have both. Indies aren't going away.

How is The Outer Worlds? I heard it is basically space Fallout, which if that is half as good as it sounds I am all over it.

I bought xbox game pass just to play The Outer Worlds. Best fun I've had playing a game since FNV and watching Firefly. If they pooled the resources for their studios it would be amazing.

I don’t see how $10/mo is at all profitable with them adding all these AAA games to it.

What's your take on the potential long-term success of Game Pass?

TikTok is not an investment in tech, it’s an investment in relations with the US public sector. The fact that it comes with an actual company attached is almost irrelevant for Oracle.

> Now all restaurants are Taco Bell

Or was it Pizza Hut?[1]

[1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106697/alternateversions

I'm not sure where this came from. Are you saying that Microsoft is opposed to modding?

The East India Company was founded in 1600 and had its own army before it was nationalized. So it is not like big companies is something that never happened before. And as we can see in the US, the state can easily control, cooperate with and even destroy companies, no matter how big they are.

I've been a Playstation gamer since the PS2. I have multiple PS4s and a library of over 1000 games in my digital account.

With that context laid out that I am a big-time PS user, looking at the XBOX game pass subscription model where you get the console for free is REALLY tempting.

In every market I've looked at, there is a deal that works out to about $30 a month for two years. They give you the console, instant access to hundreds of really good games, day one access to all microsoft first-party games included in the price, many new release games from other publishers (for example EA ACCESS titles). Free monthly titles on PC.

AND all of that is actually CHEAPER than buying the console with the two years of subscription.

Plus the XBOX is going to have a number of new features related to second-screen-game-streaming that are also really exciting.

I'm really torn here right now. I might move away from playstation for this next generation - the XBOX is looking like it is going to be a big deal this time round.

OTOH - I really want to play the Miles Morales spider-man ... so there are arguments on both sides. To say nothing of the third option involving an Nvidia RTX3080...

I honestly don't know what I'm going to do yet.

One really refreshing thing is that the Xbox Series S/X are compatible with Xbox One controllers.. so you won't have to buy a bunch of new controllers for it.

That always drove me nuts. Controller design hasn't changed that much since the mid 2000's.. there's zero reason for breaking backwards compatibility other than to sell you more hardware.

They're both basically a great value gaming PC at this point. With a handful of hardware-level optimizations making them cheap and powerful for the price.

That depends on your definition of free market, but I think everyone likes the golden-years of a free market. The long tail of unhindered capitalism has some rough edges, we have some laws to help but they're not much use if no-one uses them.

Honestly, their investment into game pass and cloud streaming is currently making me choose an Android phone over the new iPhone.

I feel like actual AAA gaming has never been more accessible than it is now.

I still have some trouble around the idea that hardcore consumers will want a bundle that has maybe 2-5 games they would have bought otherwise + 95 more they dont really care about.

Aren't consumers just going to buy what they want anyway? Plus the Sony world just has so many more games worth playing

I wonder if they are moving to a subscription model because players hate the Windows store and basically refuse to use it instead of Steam when purchasing games. Having failed at running a store I wonder if they've decided plan b is running a rental service.

Paradox are an absolute gem. My god, these people owe me hundreds of hours of my life! And I'm not really into games.

I don't see how both game streaming and high resolution/high refresh rate displays can both be the future. The bandwidth requirements will keep going up and high resolution particle effects can create terrible compression artifacts.

Local processing power is also not standing still in time, the capability a given price purchases is increasing year upon year. Do you imagine a future where people have limitless bandwidth, with low latency, and only use incapable thin clients?

Coincidentally, they're all games that work very well on Linux.

The upside being that in the game industry overall, it's never been easier to get started and to reach a wide audience.

So while the inevitable trajectory of AAA gaming is consolidation, we are still seeing more and more indie developers break out and succeed at a larger scale, and there's no reason why that phenomenon shouldn't continue (or even grow).

_Laugh in cyperpunk_

That was more then 18 years ago though, back when Microsoft was very new to the console game. They've had a lot of successes and failures since then. A more recent example would be Mojang which has gone extremely well for them - Minecraft is now the best selling game of all time with 147m copies by 2019 compared to around 14m back in 2014 when the company was acquired - largely down to their successful pivot to mobile and console.

I hope that was long enough in the past where they've done their DD and learned their very-much-needed lesson.

Pre-MS Rare was my personal golden age of gaming. I don't really play anymore, but man do I think fondly on those days.

How did it not go well?

> Kinect Sports Rivals

Great game

> Sea of Thieves

Another great title

I really hope that they move away from the ESO/MMO format that they've focused on the last few years in regards to Elder Scrolls. I'm a huge fan of that series, but I just have zero interest in playing MMOs, and it's clear that they've been trying to push further into that space as opposed to shipping high-quality single-player games.

Well, I find this even more ironic, giving how wannabe game developers just blindly following Carmack's advises.

> Speaking to bit-tech for a forthcoming Custom PC feature about the future of OpenGL in PC gaming, Carmack said 'I actually think that Direct3D is a rather better API today.' He also added that 'Microsoft had the courage to continue making significant incompatible changes to improve the API, while OpenGL has been held back by compatibility concerns. Direct3D handles multi-threading better, and newer versions manage state better.'

A few paragraphs below

> 'It is really just inertia that keeps us on OpenGL at this point,' Carmack told us. He also explained that the developer has no plans to move over to Direct3D, despite its advantages.

https://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/pc/carmack-directx-bett...

And for a more up to date remarks

> "Lets fix OpenGL" http://cs.cornell.edu/~asampson/media/papers/opengl-snapl201... some interesting thoughts, but the shading language is the least broken part of OpenGL.

> For everyone saying "Vulkan!", the conclusion is that there is an opportunity for an API between Vulkan and the game engines. I agree.

https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/851397231320150017?...

So I can definitely feel the irony.

Can you clarify what you mean? I recently got into developing on the Quake 2 engine, which I think is an amazing piece of software, so I'm kinda obsessed with all things Quake right now.

I believe it was in the 80's when they changed the interpretation of monopoly to only be illegal if it can be proven that the consumer suffers. So in a way, yes we have given up.

Even 7.5B is still only 15% of the failed TikTok deal. Seems like a bargain in comparison.

I swapped my numbers, thanks for the heads up, fixed now.

> Hmm, MS buying Obsidian was sad news, mainly because their titles became inaccessible on Mac/Linux.

Don't forget inXile. Still waiting on that Linux version of Wasteland 3.

Hey, at least we've got that RBG news last week so, not everything has been bad this year.

I worked at Turn 10 (the Xbox studio which makes Forza) about a year and a half ago. Work life balance was amazing. The tech director of the studio made it a huge point that staff get adequate time off. He brought it up in almost every dev team meeting, "Let me know if you don't feel like you can take time off". He also made a huge point about having a sustainable team.

I don't know that this is a characteristic of all Microsoft studios. Departments in Microsoft can almost be like little companies all of their own. It _did_ leave a positive impression on me though and I can see myself working at Microsoft again in the future.

I left on good terms to see what it was like to work at startups.

> Bethesda/Zenimax has arguably the longest lineup of critically acclaimed franchises in the video game world

Let me introduce you to a little company called Nintendo.

Honestly it is hard for me to see how Microsoft can ruin Bethesda any worse than ZeniMax was already....

the new Doom was ok, but the new Fallout was TERRIBLE, as with many other recent Bethesda ventures...

Are you joking? What could Microsoft ever do that's as bad as Fallout 76?

Also iD, and Arkane?

I doubt this. Microsoft has spent last years integrating PC gaming under XBOX brand too. E.g. XBOX Game Pass for PC, or adding controller support etc.

They even promote so called "Xbox Play Anywhere", and tried to make it normal for the new XBOX so that you can buy a single game and play it on PC and XBOX. However the gaming studios haven't yet to my knowledge approved it fully so they want to sell you the game twice.

After all the PC gaming benefits Microsoft too.

I would hope this would not be the case - in the past few years Microsoft have gone out of their way to build bridges with the PC gaming community, bringing their traditional first party titles (Forza, Halo, etc) to PC.

With Fallout and The Elder Scrolls’ history as PC only titles in their early iterations I would suspect this bridge building will continue

For investors maybe, but probably not for consumers. It seems likely this will result in people having less choice about how and where they can play the games they enjoy.

I find it troubling that good news for the former group seems to trump bad news for the latter.

Unfortunately, it probably does mean that you won't be playing ES6 on your PS5

It'll be on PC certainly, probably not on PS5...

Please no. Isn't that what they tried when they made Fallout 4 and it's easily the worst of the modern fallouts.

We had it, it's called The Outer World ;)

(I know, I know...)