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Xbox boss Spencer says he wants as many people as possible to play Bethesda titles

Xbox boss Spencer says he wants as many people as possible to play Bethesda titles

The head of Microsoft's games business Phil Spencer (pictured) has said that the firm's recent acquisition of Bethesda won't result in the studio's games being exclusive to Xbox hardware.

Speaking to Kotaku, the Xbox boss said that he wants games to be played by as many people as possible. This, of course, is part of the reason why Microsoft has invested in cloud streaming as well as creating a subscription service for video games.

“This deal was not done to take games away from another player base like that," Spencer said.

"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—I’m just answering directly the question that you had—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.”

Microsoft bought Bethesda's parent company ZeniMax for $7.5bn last month. This led to speculation that the firm's future releases might be exclusive to the Big M's own ecosystem.


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.