On Monday, Microsoft bought ZeniMax Media, a video game development and distribution company that has among its subsidiaries Bethesda Softworks, a company that produces some of the most important video games in the world, such as the series “Elder Scrolls”, “Fallout”, “Doom “,” Quake “and” Wolfenstein “. Microsoft has spent $ 7.5 billion, and while this isn't the largest acquisition in the video game market, it's the largest involving a company that is also a console maker, like Microsoft with Xbox.
The acquisition is very important to Microsoft, because for years one of Xbox's weaknesses in competing with Sony's PlayStation has been the scarcity of exclusive video games. In 2014 Microsoft bought the production house of “Minecraft” for 2.5 billion dollars, and owns some famous series like “Halo”, but PlayStation has always been stronger with exclusives and previews.
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Sony has also owned multiple video game companies for years, but things have changed in recent times, as the New York Times wrote. Last year Microsoft had overtaken Sony in the number of production companies controlled, 15 against 14, and with the latest acquisition it brought them to 23. ZeniMax Media, in fact, is a conglomerate that in addition to Bethesda also controls other production studios. .
Bethesda was founded in 1986 and is a historic company renowned for the production of action, role-playing and first-person shooter video games, with fantasy or science fiction settings. His video games are available on all major consoles. Prior to the acquisition by Microsoft, Bethesda had announced that its two latest games, “Deathloop” and “GhostWire: Tokyo”, would be released on PlayStation and PC before the other platforms, thus excluding Xbox. Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox, said Microsoft will honor Bethesda's commitments to PlayStation, but that later decisions on previews and exclusives will be made on a case-by-case basis.
According to analysts (both Nick Statt on The Verge and Dan Gallagher on the Wall Street Journal) the main reason Microsoft bought ZeniMax Media is not to have new video games exclusively for its Xbox, when rather to get new content for the game inexpensively. your subscription service.
While Sony's strategy has always been to have the best and most anticipated video games as an exclusive or preview, for some time Microsoft has been betting heavily on Xbox Game Pass, a subscription service that at a price similar to that of Netflix (10 euros per month of media, with variations depending on the type of account) allows you to play a large catalog of video games on consoles, on PCs and even on Android smartphones. Instead of chasing the best video games one by one, Microsoft therefore seeks to build a solid catalog to sell a monthly subscription to tens of millions of gamers.
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Some Bethesda video games are already available for free to Game Pass subscribers, but are often pre-released for a fee on other platforms. With the acquisition, Microsoft will be able to make all the production company's new video games available on its subscription service from day one, and without having to make expensive financial agreements. Currently, Game Pass subscribers are 15 million and make Microsoft $ 1 billion a year.
Systems that synchronize video games using the cloud such as Game Pass are increasingly popular. Both Microsoft and Sony are about to launch their new consoles, Xbox X and PlayStation 5 respectively, in the coming weeks, and both will have a version without the optical player: the video games will be downloaded from the platforms' online stores.
