Microsoft just announced that it is acquiring ZeniMax Media, the parent company behind Bethesda and ultimately the owner of some of the most popular game series in the world: Elder Scrolls, Fallout, and Doom franchises among many others. It represents a massive expansion of Microsoft's slate of popular games as the company makes its subscription-based Game Pass service a focal point of its campaign for the upcoming Xbox launch.
Interestingly, Dishonoured 2 is scheduled to leave PC Game Pass at the end of the month. I’d like to believe that the specter of Dishonoured leaving prompted some late night panic corporate shopping.
If it does happen, I imagine it’ll be a ways off, but it’s totally on the table now, whereas it was basically an impossibility before.
Plus, Obsidian and Josh Sawyer himself are tweeting about it… Tho I imagine that’s more to do with the fact that they’ve almost certainly received several thousand messages to the effect of, ‘NEW VEGAS 2?!’ within the last couple of hours.
I feel like I’m supposed to feel more disgusted about this. Corporate consolidation is bad, no question about it. But then I see folks comparing this to the Disney x Fox deal and think…well no, not yet at least. Gaming is not the most competitive of industries with, in general, a grouping of large companies controlling things. But it isn’t quite Disney owner a majority of the biggest blockbusters of the year and then a sprinkle of Universal and Warner Bros taking up 90% of the remainder.
I’m hoping this works out well for the employees more than anything else.
Cool games and Game Pass additions are a personal +, but yeah, a bit selfish to look at that right now I suppose.
Honestly this feels weird because my impression of the Xbox plan so far. They understand how fuck our economical system is and how-much people have been screwed, this predates COVID19. So instead of the big expensive box and a lot of big expensive games they are shooting for a cheaper box and a subscription. We don’t own anything and become more and more the beautiful neo-feudal society that we’re turning into.
A lot of corporation are tuning their business models into taking advantage of scarcity and the sad part is that is gonna work because it’s convenient.
While I don’t doubt that consolidation is a bad thing and digital rights are a greater minefield than purchasing physical games, I do want to push back against the notion that game ownership is this all important thing that is now being threatened.
Case in point, the Super Nintendo is my all time favorite system, and I probably put in more hours playing that console as a kid than any other before or since. I also ever owned like six games for it, two of which were the Mario World and All-Stars pack in games. The rest of my gaming was done through copious amount of renting games from the local rental shop. I really don’t see Game Pass as being anything more than a modern version of that. But perhaps I’m looking at it too simplistically.
Corporate structuring in film media contributed to wiping out middle budget projects, but games already eliminated anything between indie and AAA ages ago. This doesn’t mean much unless you’re all-in on PS5 for the future.
Though I don’t know why anyone would celebrate it either. It’s not like Bethesda was struggling to survive.
