Bethesda was unpleasantly surprised withMicrosoft’s recent promise to keepCall of Dutyon PlayStation, having raised numerous concerns about the move, newly publicized court documents have revealed. This bit of insight into the inner workings of the tech giant’s gaming unit arrived as part of the discovery phase ofMicrosoft’s pending trial with the FTC over the Activision Blizzard acquisition.
While Microsoft historically employed a hands-off approach to managing its growing list of game developers, most such companies it acquired over the last decade ended up being organized under its Xbox Game Studios division. The sole exception to that trend wasMicrosoft’s acquisition of Bethesda parent ZeniMax Media, which retained near-complete autonomy once that $7.5 billion deal was completed in March 2021. And while ZeniMax continues to operate as a separate subsidiary to this date, its unprecedented degree of separation from Xbox Game Studios came with some synergistic tradeoffs.
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This became apparent less than a year into the ZeniMax acquisition, when Microsoft surprised Bethesda with its February 2022 promise to keepCall of Dutyon PlayStation should it complete the Activision Blizzard deal. In a subsequent email to Phil Spencer, Bethesda Global Marketing SVP Pete Hines asked the Xbox chief for clarification on how the company’s approach to the Activision Blizzard acquisition differs from the ZeniMax deal, which immediately sawMicrosoftpull all present and future Bethesda projects not tied with pre-existing exclusivity agreements from PlayStation.
At the same time, Hines also expressed more strongly worded befuddlement with this state of affairs to Bethesda Director Todd Howard and several other colleagues, according to a copy of their communication obtained and publicized by the FTC. Spencer’s response to Hines wasn’t made public, but given how theXbox boss swore an oath overCall of Duty’sPlayStation futurejust the other day, it would appear that Microsoft’s segregated platform strategy remains unchanged.
Shortly after the ZeniMax acquisition closed,Hines personally apologized to PS5 players overStarfield’sXbox exclusivity, which likely made Microsoft’s promise that Activision Blizzard’s game catalog won’t follow suit all the more surprising for the executive. The fact that Bethesda was kept out of the loop about that decision also appeared to contribute to the concerns he raised internally.
The FTC’s attorneys have already scrutinized those issues, having subsequently posited that ZeniMax is a good indicator of what kind of fate awaits Activision Blizzard’s catalog in the long term. In spite of Microsoft’s pledges to the contrary, the stateside agency is essentially arguing that the tech giant cannot be trusted not to pull Activision Blizzard’s games from rival platforms once the dust from its $69 billion acquisition settles.
