Microsoft to Acquire Bethesda for $ 7.5 Billion – Gaming – News

Microsoft has acquired Bethesda and all associated game studios. With the takeover, Microsoft will acquire franchises such as Doom, Fallout, Wolfenstein, Quake, The Elder Scrolls and Dishonored. The studios are added to Xbox Game Studios.

Microsoft has reached an agreement to acquire ZeniMax Media, the parent company of Bethesda Softworks, which controls all game studios. Microsoft pays $ 7.5 billion for the acquisition. It is expected to be fully completed by the middle of next year.

Bethesda is both a publisher and developer of numerous games and has a total of 2300 employees at various studios. They all become part of Microsoft. These are studios such as id Software, Arkane and MachineGames. It’s the studios that have been making games under the Bethesda flag in franchises like The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake, Dishonored, Prey, Starfield and more in recent years.

Microsoft releases all of its own games through Game Pass for Xbox and Windows, so that means all new games in the aforementioned franchises will also be available for consoles and PC as part of the subscription. It is not certain whether this also applies to existing games. Microsoft states that Bethesda supported its Game Pass subscription early on. Various Bethesda games were or are already available through the subscription.

Microsoft announced the acquisition a day before the Xbox Series X and S can be ordered. These consoles can be ordered in advance from Tuesday morning at 9:00 am Dutch time. Microsoft is strongly committed to its Game Pass subscription to attract gamers. Tweakers wrote about this in a last week preview of the next-gen consoles.

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