Microsoft Acquires Bethesda And ZeniMax For $7.5 Billion

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Bethesda Game Studios

Microsoft dropped a bombshell first thing Monday morning.

The company has signed a $7.5 billion agreement to acquire ZeniMax Media, Bethesda Softworks, and their subsidiary game studios. These include Bethesda Game Studios, id Software, ZeniMax Online Studios, Arkane, MachineGames, Tango Gameworks, Alpha Dog, and Roundhouse Studios.

Among the game franchises that come with them are Skyrim and the rest of The Elder Scrolls series, Fallout, Doom, Dishonored, Prey, Wolfenstein, Quake, and Bethesda’s upcoming outer-space RPG, Starfield.

Historically, this deal makes a lot of sense. Xbox head Phil Spencer is nothing if not sentimental, and The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind was a crucial game for the console’s early years.

“Microsoft was just trying to wine and dine basically any studios that would have games for them to promote as hot properties to drum up excitement for the Xbox,” Morrowind artist Noah Berry told me in late 2018, recalling the turn of the millennium. “And there was probably a huge financial benefit to doing so. That may also have been part of Todd’s vision, too. He’s definitely a big console gamer, as well, so he was also just enthused about the idea that we could make this work—take this crazy, complex, PC-style game, and get it to work on this brand-new system.”

“We were really unsure about the Xbox,” Bethesda’s Todd Howard said a few months later. “I had made a bet, internally, that there’s no chance the Xbox would come close to the PC sales. And someone bet me that the Xbox [edition] would outsell it, which it did. The Xbox version was extremely difficult. We had never done a console game—even though the original Xbox was very PC-like. Microsoft was a great partner; they believed in the game and helped us quite a bit.”

In more recent years, pre-coronavirus, Howard has been seen taking the stage during Xbox’s annual E3 press briefings to sing Microsoft’s praises before showing off the latest Fallout or Elder Scrolls release for consoles. With hindsight, all those events now seem to have been foreshadowing today’s news.

Spencer writes that “Bethesda’s iconic franchises” will be coming to Game Pass for console and PC, so look for that in the near future. It’ll be nice to see Skyrim and Fallout 4, two of the most beloved games from the last decade, become permanent fixtures of the Game Pass library.