“With the addition of the Bethesda creative teams, gamers should know that Xbox consoles, PC, and Game Pass will be the best place to experience new Bethesda games, including some new titles in the future that will be exclusive to Xbox and PC players.”
Head of Xbox, Phil Spencer
There are no official specifics on how long these games might be exclusive on the PS5, but afterward, the games will come to Xbox in addition to launching as a part of Game Pass, available to those subscribers for no additional cost.
It’s extremely unlikely that Microsoft will then remove the games from the PS Store. Taking them off would be more of a Nintendo move.
While none of these games have been confirmed, it’s a near guarantee that there will be new Doom and Wolfenstein games after the critical and commercial acclaim the series’ two most recent entries obtained.
Sequels to Prey, Dishonored 2, and The Evil Within 2 are a little more dubious. While those games were received well by critics, it seems that sales numbers for the titles were disappointing.
The developers of these games, Arkane Studios and Tango Gameworks, are also currently busy with developing Deathloop and GhostWire: Tokyo respectively. It stands to reason that, as long as those two new IPs succeed, they will inspire subsequent releases that keep the studios from needing to return to their older, less successful franchises.
The next game from Bethesda Game Studios, the developers of The Elder Scrolls and Fallout series, is a sci-fi RPG.
Like Indiana Jones, this being the first in the franchise makes it much easier for Xbox to justify exclusivity.
Putting Starfield on other consoles would also leave players unprepared for the publisher’s next decision...
Xbox has made it clear that it views its cloud gaming platform as much of a pillar to its success as any one console.
That service will likely be much more robust at the launch of the next Elder Scrolls than it is today, offering true console-quality experiences on even more devices.
Exclusivity won’t be nearly as big a factor to the consumer as it is today, because you won’t need a multi-hundred dollar console or PC to play these games.
Of course, this is all speculation, but it’s as best a reading of the gaming tea leaves as we can make with all the information we have presented at the time. We look forward to being proven wrong when The Elder Scrolls VI comes to the Nintendo Switch Pro.