Post updated below 8.28.23.
It’s been a long time coming, but Starfield is almost here. The day is almost upon us. The time is nigh. September 1st for pre-orders and September 6th for everyone else.
And for the first time in a very, very long time, Xbox is about to launch the biggest console exclusive of the year—bigger than Sony’s Spider-Man 2, bigger than Nintendo’s The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom.
In a year full of massive game releases—Hogwarts Legacy, Diablo IV, Baldur’s Gate 3, etc. etc.—none are as hotly-anticipated as Starfield, Bethesda’s answer to the question: “What if Skyrim, but in space?”
This is partly because Starfield has been in development for so long, and partly because Bethesda’s other big RPG—Elder Scrolls VI—is still years away. Starfield was announced in 2018, before Microsoft acquired Bethesda parent company ZeniMax in 2020 for a cool $7.5 billion.
In fact, Microsoft decided to pull the trigger on that acquisition over fears that Sony would make a deal with Bethesda to lock Xbox out.
“When we acquired ZeniMax one of the impetus for that is that Sony had done a deal for Deathloop and Ghostwire to pay Bethesda to not ship those games on Xbox,” Xbox chief Phil Spencer said during an FTC v Microsoft hearing earlier this year. “So the discussion about Starfield when we heard that Starfield was potentially also going to end up skipping Xbox, we can’t be in a position as a third-place console where we fall further behind on our content ownership so we’ve had to secure content to remain viable in the business.”
Now it appears the chickens are coming home to roost for Sony. Those exclusivity deals might have paid off in the short-term, but with Xbox now owning Bethesda outright, it’s unlikely any more of their games will ever come to PlayStation. Starfield is the first of many. An Indiana Jones game is in the works at Bethesda that will also skip PlayStation, and it seems unlikely that Elder Scrolls VI will launch on any console other than Xbox.
And Bethesda isn’t the only game developer Microsoft has gobbled up. Along with a bunch of smaller studios, Microsoft is in the process of acquiring Call Of Duty publisher Activision in a nearly $70 billion deal.
With Microsoft making these massive games part of Xbox Game Pass, the barrier to play has never been lower for Xbox gamers, who can easily start a Game Pass subscription just to play one title and then stop their membership until another game comes out that they want to play.
Whether or not that’s a healthy future for the video game industry or sustainable for game developers and publishers is another matter entirely.
This could be the beginning of a major shift in the console wars, especially if Starfield turns out to be a hit. Judging by the success of the Fallout and Elder Scrolls series, that seems like a foregone conclusion.
Update 8/28/23
I have a couple more thoughts to add to the above post, so I figured I’d just add them here.
First, I want to make it very clear that I don’t have anything against Sony or PlayStation whatsoever. I love many PlayStation exclusives from Spider-Man to Ratchet and Clank to The Last Of Us.
I gave Spider-Man a 9.5/10 when I reviewed it. Demon’s Souls and Bloodborne, both of which are PlayStation exclusives, are among my favorite games of all time. I love Uncharted and God Of War and so on and so forth. Sony has some terrific games, and I love to play them on my PS3, PS4 and PS5. I’d still be playing on my PS Vita if it hadn’t broken.
But I also think that competition is a good thing, so I like to root for the underdog. In this case, that’s Xbox. I want Xbox to give Sony a run for its money. I want Xbox to offer more compelling exclusives. I think that leads to a healthier market for gamers.
This brings me to my second, perhaps contradictory, point. As much as I want Sony and Xbox to keep pumping out exclusives, I also don’t love the trend we’ve seen recently of so many studio acquisitions. Microsoft has been on a major buying spree, and Bethesda and Activision will now both be Microsoft developers, with previously cross-platform content leaving Sony.
Of course, this is partly Sony’s fault. As I point out above, Microsoft was spurred into buying Bethesda specifically because Sony was making exclusivity deals on Bethesda games. Sony has purchased plenty of top-notch devs in the past in order to keep as many compelling titles exclusive to PlayStation as possible. The only way to answer that is by doing what Microsoft is doing now and scooping up more studios to compete.
Finally, I don’t know what to think about Xbox Game Pass. It’s a smart business move on Microsoft’s part but I am very worried that the subscription model is a house of cards. We’re already seeing this with media streaming content and the ways that Netflix “disrupting” the entertainment industry could actually lead to it imploding altogether. I would hate to see something similar in gaming.
So no, I don’t want PlayStation to fail. I want Sony and Microsoft and Nintendo and every game studio out there to succeed.
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