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Xbox head honcho Phil Spencer has spoken on Xbox's recent $7.5 billion dollar deal to acquire Bethesda parent company Zenimax, and has said that he doesn't believe the company needs to go multiplatform with big upcoming titles such as The Elder Scrolls VI to recoup that cost.
Speaking in an interview with Kotaku, Spencer was directly asked if he believed his company would be able to recover the expenditure without releasing The Elder Scrolls VI on PlayStation, saying: "Yes," but also adding "I don’t want to be flip about that. This deal was not done to take games away from another player base like that. Nowhere in the documentation that we put together was: ‘How do we keep other players from playing these games?’ We want more people to be able to play games, not fewer people to be able to go play games."
"But I’ll also say in the model," he continued "When I think about where people are going to be playing and the number of devices that we had, and we have xCloud and PC and Game Pass and our console base, I don’t have to go ship those games on any other platform other than the platforms that we support in order to kind of make the deal work for us. Whatever that means."
Though it doesn't rule out the possiblity of future Bethesda games releasing on other formats, it does seem to indicate that Xbox as a company wouldn't be under any financial obligation to do so. The company has already promised to honour existing contracts with Deathloop and Ghostwire: Tokyo which will still remain as timed PlayStation 5 exclusives for the time being.
It'll probably still be some time though before we hear about The Elder Scrolls VI though, with Bethesda saying any formal reveal was still "years" away back in May so it looks like we won't find out for sure for some time yet. In the meantime, you can check out some of our Josh's uneasy feelings on the recent Xbox acqusition of Bethesda over here.