Phil Spencer puts PS5 players on notice: Bethesda only needs Xbox

During a recent interview with Kotaku, Head of Xbox Phil Spencer hinted that future Bethesda games don’t need PlayStation 5 in order for the company to make a profit on its purchase of the studio, further implying that those games may never make their way to Sony’s console.

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When Xbox announced that it was purchasing ZeniMax Media, the parent company of the mega-publisher Bethesda, speculation went rampant about whether or not future games in franchises like Doom, The Elder Scrolls, Starfield, and more would be coming to PlayStation 5 in the future.

Some players seemed to think that this deal was only in place so that Xbox could get those franchises on GamesPass with ease, while others thought it only made sense for Bethesda to only focus on exclusive games from now on. While we still don’t know the full answer, we now have a new hint at Xbox’s attitude on the whole subject.

Phil Spencer, who is well known as the head and face of Xbox, said in a Kotaku interview that the company doesn’t want to “take games away from another player base,” instead saying that “We want more people to be able to play games.”

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While sentiment is all well and good, Spencer went on to say that Xbox doesn’t need to put Bethesda games on other consoles in order to make back the $7.5 billion investment in the publisher, which contradicts that previous sentence.

“I don’t have to go ship those games on any other platform other than the platforms that we support in order to kind of make the deal work for us,” Spencer said.

• Read more: When is Starfield coming out? Everything we know about Bethesda’s space based RPG

This, of course, isn’t a blatant admission that future Bethesda games won’t be coming to PS5, and the company probably won’t outright confirm it one way or another for a long time.

That being said, it certainly seems like PlayStation fans shouldn’t hold their breath about games like The Elder Scrolls VI, which was explicitly mentioned in the interview, coming to the console.