Microsoft and Bethesda: the European antitrust will consider the acquisition

Microsoft’s huge acquisition of Bethesda, formally still underway, has not been talked about much in recent weeks, especially due to the huge stock turmoil that has affected GameStop and that are keeping most fans on their toes. Yet in recent days the Bethesda case has come back on everyone's lips, especially after Microsoft, on January 29, formally requested the European Commission to approve the operation, which is worth a good 7.5 billion dollars. The Commission, as you know, has a department dedicated to antitrust, that is the set of rules that regulate competition between companies in the economic field.

This department will be responsible for examining the huge acquisition, announced last September and destined to close - if all goes well - by next spring. The response from the European Commission should arrive by March 5, the date by which Todd Howard and his companions will join Xbox Game Studios. If problems are found, however, the court will instead have the power to investigate further, which could lead to a temporary freeze of operations; Microsoft, for its part, is confident that everything will go smoothly, since, in the field of entertainment, its would not be the first acquisition of this magnitude.

Microsoft, we recall, has acquired not only Bethesda Softworks, but the entire group of ZeniMax Media, which, in addition to the team responsible for The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, includes id Software (Doom, Quake, Rage ), Arkane Studios (Deathloop, Prey, Dishonored), MachineGames (Wolfenstein, Indiana Jones), Tango GameWorks (GhostWire Tokyo, The Evil Within) and the lesser known Roundhouse Studios and Alpha Dog Games. All of the ZeniMax subsidiaries should almost certainly follow the same logic applied thus far to the teams under the Xbox wing, which up until now, in recent years, have released all their exclusives on Game Pass on day one.

Speaking of exclusives, however, it is not yet clear whether Bethesda and his companions will follow the same path, starting to produce video games available only on PC and Xbox, or if they will continue to be released on all platforms. At the moment, the hypothesis of a "case by case" evaluation seems the most probable, but, on the other hand, it is also true that the two Ori and Cuphead, the only games recently published first on Xbox and which have then seen the light elsewhere (in this case on the Switch), were developed by Studio MDHR and Moon Studios, which are not among Microsoft's first parties.

On Amazon you can book Deathloop in the PlayStation 5 version, on which it will be released in temporal exclusive (its platforms were announced prior to the Bethesda acquisition).