The CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, Jim Ryan, seems eager as anyone else to know if fans of PlayStation 5 will play future games of Bethesda.
The fate of Bethesda Softworks’ upcoming projects has indeed been a major talking point since Microsoft announced in September that it intends to acquire ZeniMax Media for $7.5 billion. Should the deal be completed, as planned, in early 2021, Xbox Game Studios will grow from 15 to 23 development teams, including Bethesda Game Studios, the creator of the Fallout and Elder Scrolls series, as well as the upcoming sci-fi game Starfield.
In an interview with Russian news agency TASS, PlayStation boss, Jim Ryan, was asked how he felt about the acquisition, and if Playstation 5 players couldn’t play The Elder Scrolls 6 or Starfield.
“That’s a decision that is out of our hands, we’ll wait and see what happens. I look forward to learning about that. We just take a different approach. Our emphasis has been to focus on really steady, slow, but constant organic growth of our studios, selectively bolstered by acquisitions. We respect the steps taken by our competition, they seem logical and sensible. But we’re equally happy and confident; we’ve got a better launch lineup than we’ve ever had at any of our console launches.”
Following the announcement of the acquisition of ZeniMax, Xbox boss Phil Spencer said Microsoft will honor the existing PlayStation 5 exclusive deals that Bethesda has in place for games like Deathloop and Ghostwire: Tokyo.
For future Bethesda games, Spencer said they will take other consoles on a case-by-case basis. Finally, Ryan told TASS that “you’re going to see some wonderful things in the same way that it was 2015-2016 for the previous generation, when the generation defining-games started to be published.”