Microsoft Buys Bethesda
**Microsoft Acquires Bethesda Softworks: A Gameday for Xbox's Future**
In a move that has sent ripples through the gaming world, Microsoft has acquired Bethesda Softworks in a $7.5 billion deal—a figure comparable to their past acquisitions of GitHub and Nokia. This bold step underscores Microsoft's commitment to fortifying its position in the gaming industry, particularly with the rise of cloud-based gaming and subscription services.
### The Acquisition: A Strategic Move
The acquisition of Bethesda Softworks, known for iconic franchises like *The Elder Scrolls*, *Doom*, *Wolfenstein*, and *Fallout*, marks a significant shift in Microsoft's strategy. This purchase doubles Microsoft's game studio count, surpassing Sony's tally, and positions them as a formidable player in the gaming sector.
### Comparisons with Past Acquisitions
Comparing this deal to Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub for $7.5 billion and Nokia for around $7.6 billion, it's evident that Microsoft is willing to invest heavily in strategic assets. While GitHub and Nokia were tech and hardware giants respectively, Bethesda brings a wealth of IPs (Intellectual Properties) that promise long-term benefits.
### Strengthening Xbox's Position
Bethesda's acquisition addresses Xbox's historical weakness: the lack of first-party exclusive games. By securing major franchises, Microsoft aims to bolster its console ecosystem and subscription service, Xbox Game Pass, which now gains over 50 new titles from Bethesda's portfolio.
### The Rise of Cloud Gaming
The shift towards cloud gaming is a pivotal factor in this acquisition. By offering day-and-date releases on Xbox Game Pass, Microsoft aims to create an irresistible value proposition for gamers, challenging Sony's traditional hardware and software model.
### Impact on Competition
While Sony continues to thrive with its hardware-centric approach, Microsoft's cloud focus differentiates it. This strategic divergence sets the stage for a new era of competition, where subscription services and cloud capabilities are key battlegrounds.
### Financial and Historical Context
Investing $7.5 billion in gaming might seem hefty, but Microsoft sees this as an opportunity to leverage its cloud infrastructure and redefine gaming accessibility. Historically, Xbox faced challenges with reliability issues (e.g., the "Red Ring of Death") and missteps like the Kinect integration. However, the Series X/S consoles represent a rebound.
### The Future Outlook
With Bethesda on board, Microsoft is poised for growth. The acquisition aligns with their long-term vision to make gaming accessible across platforms, enhancing Xbox Game Pass's appeal and solidifying their cloud strengths.
In conclusion, Microsoft's acquisition of Bethesda Softworks is more than a financial move; it's a strategic play to redefine gaming in the cloud era. As they continue to innovate, the future looks promising for both Xbox and its growing community of gamers.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis is twit somebody was pointing out i think it was in forbes they said you know it's not like sony could do this they don't even they don't only a company with deep pockets could pay seven and a half billion dollars to acquire a game company the same price they paid for github by the way wow about the same as nokia as well and it's just gonna measure nokia we'll just say that microsoft is acquiring bethesda for one nokia that's kind of amazing i'm a little more bullish on this though than i was on the nokia purchase i think this is gonna be good yeah sure i mean i i uh i think this makes a ton more sense than throw tick tock yeah i mean yeah i even think it makes more sense than that yeah this also kind of sends a message about how serious they are about this market because i think a lot of people and i've certainly gone down this road in the past have said that you know maybe they should spin off xbox this doesn't necessarily make any sense and then as we move into the cloud era at cloud-based gaming you kind of see how microsoft might want to stick with it but the big dig against xbox has been game studios exclusive games and so forth and i think i don't remember the exact numbers but sony is somewhere 13 or 14 and microsoft has 21 and 22 something like that i mean they have more game studios than sony does now so wow and these are some these are some great games so bethesda is of course best known well i don't know i like the elder scrolls that's skyrim um i'm a big fan of that they also do doom yep they own all the ed stuff right so it's everything that all the stuff commander keane nice yeah going back you know quake um all the quake games all the doom games guys wait what about wolfenstein wolfenstein yeah wolfenstein the the game for beer drinkers yeah that's the only reason i care about that the stein okay the stein it's not what you think it is um it's uh it's turned into well um it's it's kind of well it's been rejiggered uh several times it's a kind of a modern shooter now but it's uh yeah it was the first game i felt practically the first game i fell in love with on an apple ii when they had they didn't have a sound chip stuff they didn't have sound chips so all the nazis were gone when i saw this announced monday i had to wait to write it because i was like who is bethesda softworks never heard of them right oh and let's not forget fallout another one another one i love love fallout so this thing this is a this is a studio with some real classic titles the i the ip they bought alone is probably worth the seven and a half billion yeah and they're an ongoing concern right these aren't games like retro games from the past necessarily these are you know new new fallout 76 is what came out last year or whatever i mean yeah it's good it's fun the new doom is obviously done really well um they they're yeah it's a big deal that's good what did microsoft pay for minecraft like half that right two something two point four thirty okay which is the parent company of bethesda so to be perfectly accurate but nobody knows who zenomax is but 2.5 billion bethesda soft works either for that matter but um mary jo yes i think some of us do i know some people do it's a venerated name actually i had never heard of it i'm not kidding like i was i said to people i've never heard of it and they're like come on you've played skyrim i'm like no i haven't oh that's no that's a silly thing to say but no i can't see mary jo playing skyrim but it is a beautiful i don't even know what it is but okay anyway you know i covered it though because it's an acquisition and it's a big one right and i cover microsoft so i have to know about it think of the mashups i can't wait for minecraft doom but now that it's wolfenstein minecraft yeah yeah so the bigger deal though is that now because they're a microsoft studio studio these new games as they come out will be made available on xbox game pass day and date right so this is really that's huge to me part of that cloud slash subscription yeah push that microsoft has just started and um yeah i mean this is we're getting to the point for a gamer where xbox game pass might be getting into no-brainer territory you know smart chatroom's having fun coming up with mashups pit fallout will be fun uh he's uh knox harrington says in the new halo master chief will be sidelined by an arrow to the knee that's something if mary jo doesn't know the name bethesda she's definitely not gonna get that you know what but i know that reference now because someone used it on me on twitter yeah yeah it's classic skyrim line um so no i think there's a there's this is really this is going to be very interesting and by the way it makes me cry even more that i wasn't able to get the 35 dollar microsoft xbox series x deal oh yeah you couldn't get it huh the bots beat me we're gonna we're gonna get to that because they also yeah very not happy very impressive really wow oh those black this is a a failure of azure scalability if there's ever been one i uh what a what a fiasco save that though that's that's because yeah you want to spend some time with it so yeah sure we will talk about that so what does this tell you about microsoft's ambitions in in gaming and xbox and how does this fit in with their other ambitions and with the cloud and things like that i mean you know what microsoft is in a weird place right now because they are releasing consoles and those aren't really the primary focus on the future for them right and and they obviously they want to sell consoles but hardware is an expensive business to be in it typically loses money they're looking for this you know the razer blades here in this case you know the in the back of the date was games and now it's game subscription services to kind of float those customers make them make sense financially so what this is doing is stocking up that stable that they have of games that are available via xbox game pass and cloud streaming and it just makes this entire ecosystem better for gamers it makes it more of a destination to go to um sony is doing the same thing they've always done which by the way has worked for sure i mean i'm not um not dumping on that but they want you to buy an expensive new console and they want you to buy games you know and sony or microsoft is saying you don't have to buy a console you can play games almost anywhere it's only a few places now but eventually obviously anywhere what we want you to do is subscribe to the service and you'll be able to play and you know depending on the capabilities of the system you're using you'll you'll have uh you know better experiences as you kind of go up the chain but this stuff works basically everywhere the microsoft studio game certainly do so i think that's cool plus you know obviously they're cross-platform already these guys uh have pc games that they probably sell through steam they have playstation games they sell to the the playstation store that's not going to change right but um you know if you have it with a subscription and stuff comes out dlc for a game a new game whatever you're just going to get that you know and i like i said it's not quite no-brainer depending on the types of games you want to play but uh before this acquisition there were 167 games i think it was in game pass is another 50 plus coming from ea play and then whatever the stable is of uh bethesda games it's got to be several dozens of games you know so it's definitely going to go over 200. it's it's it just tells me they're really they're serious about gaming and if i know that's a silly thing to say on the verge of a console launch but we've been we not we you know me specifically but we as a community maybe have been doubting microsoft's seriousness in this market for years you know and they've lost each generation so far with the consoles but what is lost only means that they didn't sell as many right yes but i suspect it also means they made zero money like i mean xbox as a business has not been profitable for microsoft well that's why i'm wondering why they're spending seven and a half billion dollars for a money losing business because now gaming is going to the cloud and all of a sudden there's this wonderful convergence with microsoft's key one of microsoft's key strengths um they are one of the few companies although you know again the the xbox siriusx buying experience suggests otherwise but um that has the capacity the infrastructure and and the will right to do this kind of thing they're going to do it for other companies you know back when there was an announcement where sony was partnering with microsoft to bring some future game service to azure my thought was like this could be a big chunk of what is the future of the xbox business you know they may not brand it that way but um uh providing game uh hosting services for other companies like activision or uh well ea is on microsoft now but you know there could be other big game publishing studios that want to do this kind of thing as well uh nintendo would be an obvious choice as well right the other console maker um they don't have any expertise or capability with regards to cloud computing at all they can't even they can barely release mobile games so they would be an ideal choice to come to azure or you know what's crazy to think about remember just a few years ago we were all speculating if microsoft was going to sell off the xbox division do you remember this right yeah of course everybody was like they're not really into gaming like it doesn't fit with the rest of the company and now look what's happening right it's like 180 degrees change they make these big bets right so people forget that xbox really started before the original xbox before it was called xbox because they were working with uh sega on the i missed the genesis the dreamcast and there was a windows ce environment in there and that was going to be one way that people could make games and no one ever did or whatever but i think that taught microsoft that they needed to kind of control the environment and the first xbox was basically a pc it was kind of technically successful it you know it didn't win the market or whatever but it did well unit sales wise um the xbox 360 was the break push they were going to be like apple beautiful white device uh super sleek and modern huge reliability problems scuttled that uh you know billion plus whatever it was on the warranty uh costs that they just kind of covered for everybody i said i don't remember the numbers anymore but between three xboxes i think i got them fixed for the red ring of death eight times something like that i believe that xbox is going back yep that was a three billion dollar write-off i seem to remember something huge yeah yeah so and then the xbox one you know i think i talk about you know the the the starting gun goes off and you fall you fall right in your face i mean they just they blew it from day one which is too bad because the original xbox one was kind of a clunker it's up behind me there it's a tank but uh xbox one s and then the x especially those are really elegant devices they're powerful um now they're well now they're gone but they got really inexpensive i mean and then microsoft did the whole rejiggering of their strategy you know because they had to but it turned into i think xbox has turned into something wonderful for gamers and uh it's you know we'll see we'll see what happens but i think they're going to do pretty well um i was torn between the playstation 5 and xbox but i think the acquisition of bethesda well really well i bet i'm not alone either because if you're i'm a fan of fallout and and skyrim i like the old yeah so that's why the all-access thing is so appealing 35 bucks a month you're going to get the console you own it right obviously after two years and then you get that whole stable of games yeah and you know for some people that's going to be like they you'll look at that list and say yeah this is everything i need right you know right um and that's that's an amazing value you know if you could buy it yeah because we did that if you didn't hear us last week or the week before we did the math and it's the xbox is actually a little bit less expensive if you uh you know you include the the bundle cost for the software uh yeah i think it was 40 or 60 bucks less yeah you're actually saving money you're not paying an interest anyway on the hardware so that's a pretty good deal i mean i would buy it out right but actually i'll probably do the game the pass i tried to do both but i would do either but um yeah i'll do whatever they'll let me do yeah but yeah i mean the other thing that's really interesting about that is obviously there's probably i know there's a term for this like there's an ad on tv for a car at a super low price you go to the dealership and it's like oh that one's already gone but look we have these awesome ones plus okay or you have this notion of like the apple watch starts at 99 cents but you want the one at 600 bucks right so the thing that's cool about the xbox all access is that it's such an easy justification to make you're not going from spending 300 to spending 500 you're going from spending 25 a month to 35 a month right like that difference is like one trip to dunkin donuts to keep beating to death that's the same example i always use but it's like at ten dollars a month is negligible to almost to anyone who would be in the market for buying one of these consoles so it it makes upgrading to the better one you know again a no-brainer to keep reusing things i always say but um it just makes it you know an easier thing because when when i was thinking about paying for these things all right i'm like i'll just get an s you know yeah i play on a 1440p set anyway who cares right but 10 bucks a month like well yeah x makes more sense yeahthis is twit somebody was pointing out i think it was in forbes they said you know it's not like sony could do this they don't even they don't only a company with deep pockets could pay seven and a half billion dollars to acquire a game company the same price they paid for github by the way wow about the same as nokia as well and it's just gonna measure nokia we'll just say that microsoft is acquiring bethesda for one nokia that's kind of amazing i'm a little more bullish on this though than i was on the nokia purchase i think this is gonna be good yeah sure i mean i i uh i think this makes a ton more sense than throw tick tock yeah i mean yeah i even think it makes more sense than that yeah this also kind of sends a message about how serious they are about this market because i think a lot of people and i've certainly gone down this road in the past have said that you know maybe they should spin off xbox this doesn't necessarily make any sense and then as we move into the cloud era at cloud-based gaming you kind of see how microsoft might want to stick with it but the big dig against xbox has been game studios exclusive games and so forth and i think i don't remember the exact numbers but sony is somewhere 13 or 14 and microsoft has 21 and 22 something like that i mean they have more game studios than sony does now so wow and these are some these are some great games so bethesda is of course best known well i don't know i like the elder scrolls that's skyrim um i'm a big fan of that they also do doom yep they own all the ed stuff right so it's everything that all the stuff commander keane nice yeah going back you know quake um all the quake games all the doom games guys wait what about wolfenstein wolfenstein yeah wolfenstein the the game for beer drinkers yeah that's the only reason i care about that the stein okay the stein it's not what you think it is um it's uh it's turned into well um it's it's kind of well it's been rejiggered uh several times it's a kind of a modern shooter now but it's uh yeah it was the first game i felt practically the first game i fell in love with on an apple ii when they had they didn't have a sound chip stuff they didn't have sound chips so all the nazis were gone when i saw this announced monday i had to wait to write it because i was like who is bethesda softworks never heard of them right oh and let's not forget fallout another one another one i love love fallout so this thing this is a this is a studio with some real classic titles the i the ip they bought alone is probably worth the seven and a half billion yeah and they're an ongoing concern right these aren't games like retro games from the past necessarily these are you know new new fallout 76 is what came out last year or whatever i mean yeah it's good it's fun the new doom is obviously done really well um they they're yeah it's a big deal that's good what did microsoft pay for minecraft like half that right two something two point four thirty okay which is the parent company of bethesda so to be perfectly accurate but nobody knows who zenomax is but 2.5 billion bethesda soft works either for that matter but um mary jo yes i think some of us do i know some people do it's a venerated name actually i had never heard of it i'm not kidding like i was i said to people i've never heard of it and they're like come on you've played skyrim i'm like no i haven't oh that's no that's a silly thing to say but no i can't see mary jo playing skyrim but it is a beautiful i don't even know what it is but okay anyway you know i covered it though because it's an acquisition and it's a big one right and i cover microsoft so i have to know about it think of the mashups i can't wait for minecraft doom but now that it's wolfenstein minecraft yeah yeah so the bigger deal though is that now because they're a microsoft studio studio these new games as they come out will be made available on xbox game pass day and date right so this is really that's huge to me part of that cloud slash subscription yeah push that microsoft has just started and um yeah i mean this is we're getting to the point for a gamer where xbox game pass might be getting into no-brainer territory you know smart chatroom's having fun coming up with mashups pit fallout will be fun uh he's uh knox harrington says in the new halo master chief will be sidelined by an arrow to the knee that's something if mary jo doesn't know the name bethesda she's definitely not gonna get that you know what but i know that reference now because someone used it on me on twitter yeah yeah it's classic skyrim line um so no i think there's a there's this is really this is going to be very interesting and by the way it makes me cry even more that i wasn't able to get the 35 dollar microsoft xbox series x deal oh yeah you couldn't get it huh the bots beat me we're gonna we're gonna get to that because they also yeah very not happy very impressive really wow oh those black this is a a failure of azure scalability if there's ever been one i uh what a what a fiasco save that though that's that's because yeah you want to spend some time with it so yeah sure we will talk about that so what does this tell you about microsoft's ambitions in in gaming and xbox and how does this fit in with their other ambitions and with the cloud and things like that i mean you know what microsoft is in a weird place right now because they are releasing consoles and those aren't really the primary focus on the future for them right and and they obviously they want to sell consoles but hardware is an expensive business to be in it typically loses money they're looking for this you know the razer blades here in this case you know the in the back of the date was games and now it's game subscription services to kind of float those customers make them make sense financially so what this is doing is stocking up that stable that they have of games that are available via xbox game pass and cloud streaming and it just makes this entire ecosystem better for gamers it makes it more of a destination to go to um sony is doing the same thing they've always done which by the way has worked for sure i mean i'm not um not dumping on that but they want you to buy an expensive new console and they want you to buy games you know and sony or microsoft is saying you don't have to buy a console you can play games almost anywhere it's only a few places now but eventually obviously anywhere what we want you to do is subscribe to the service and you'll be able to play and you know depending on the capabilities of the system you're using you'll you'll have uh you know better experiences as you kind of go up the chain but this stuff works basically everywhere the microsoft studio game certainly do so i think that's cool plus you know obviously they're cross-platform already these guys uh have pc games that they probably sell through steam they have playstation games they sell to the the playstation store that's not going to change right but um you know if you have it with a subscription and stuff comes out dlc for a game a new game whatever you're just going to get that you know and i like i said it's not quite no-brainer depending on the types of games you want to play but uh before this acquisition there were 167 games i think it was in game pass is another 50 plus coming from ea play and then whatever the stable is of uh bethesda games it's got to be several dozens of games you know so it's definitely going to go over 200. it's it's it just tells me they're really they're serious about gaming and if i know that's a silly thing to say on the verge of a console launch but we've been we not we you know me specifically but we as a community maybe have been doubting microsoft's seriousness in this market for years you know and they've lost each generation so far with the consoles but what is lost only means that they didn't sell as many right yes but i suspect it also means they made zero money like i mean xbox as a business has not been profitable for microsoft well that's why i'm wondering why they're spending seven and a half billion dollars for a money losing business because now gaming is going to the cloud and all of a sudden there's this wonderful convergence with microsoft's key one of microsoft's key strengths um they are one of the few companies although you know again the the xbox siriusx buying experience suggests otherwise but um that has the capacity the infrastructure and and the will right to do this kind of thing they're going to do it for other companies you know back when there was an announcement where sony was partnering with microsoft to bring some future game service to azure my thought was like this could be a big chunk of what is the future of the xbox business you know they may not brand it that way but um uh providing game uh hosting services for other companies like activision or uh well ea is on microsoft now but you know there could be other big game publishing studios that want to do this kind of thing as well uh nintendo would be an obvious choice as well right the other console maker um they don't have any expertise or capability with regards to cloud computing at all they can't even they can barely release mobile games so they would be an ideal choice to come to azure or you know what's crazy to think about remember just a few years ago we were all speculating if microsoft was going to sell off the xbox division do you remember this right yeah of course everybody was like they're not really into gaming like it doesn't fit with the rest of the company and now look what's happening right it's like 180 degrees change they make these big bets right so people forget that xbox really started before the original xbox before it was called xbox because they were working with uh sega on the i missed the genesis the dreamcast and there was a windows ce environment in there and that was going to be one way that people could make games and no one ever did or whatever but i think that taught microsoft that they needed to kind of control the environment and the first xbox was basically a pc it was kind of technically successful it you know it didn't win the market or whatever but it did well unit sales wise um the xbox 360 was the break push they were going to be like apple beautiful white device uh super sleek and modern huge reliability problems scuttled that uh you know billion plus whatever it was on the warranty uh costs that they just kind of covered for everybody i said i don't remember the numbers anymore but between three xboxes i think i got them fixed for the red ring of death eight times something like that i believe that xbox is going back yep that was a three billion dollar write-off i seem to remember something huge yeah yeah so and then the xbox one you know i think i talk about you know the the the starting gun goes off and you fall you fall right in your face i mean they just they blew it from day one which is too bad because the original xbox one was kind of a clunker it's up behind me there it's a tank but uh xbox one s and then the x especially those are really elegant devices they're powerful um now they're well now they're gone but they got really inexpensive i mean and then microsoft did the whole rejiggering of their strategy you know because they had to but it turned into i think xbox has turned into something wonderful for gamers and uh it's you know we'll see we'll see what happens but i think they're going to do pretty well um i was torn between the playstation 5 and xbox but i think the acquisition of bethesda well really well i bet i'm not alone either because if you're i'm a fan of fallout and and skyrim i like the old yeah so that's why the all-access thing is so appealing 35 bucks a month you're going to get the console you own it right obviously after two years and then you get that whole stable of games yeah and you know for some people that's going to be like they you'll look at that list and say yeah this is everything i need right you know right um and that's that's an amazing value you know if you could buy it yeah because we did that if you didn't hear us last week or the week before we did the math and it's the xbox is actually a little bit less expensive if you uh you know you include the the bundle cost for the software uh yeah i think it was 40 or 60 bucks less yeah you're actually saving money you're not paying an interest anyway on the hardware so that's a pretty good deal i mean i would buy it out right but actually i'll probably do the game the pass i tried to do both but i would do either but um yeah i'll do whatever they'll let me do yeah but yeah i mean the other thing that's really interesting about that is obviously there's probably i know there's a term for this like there's an ad on tv for a car at a super low price you go to the dealership and it's like oh that one's already gone but look we have these awesome ones plus okay or you have this notion of like the apple watch starts at 99 cents but you want the one at 600 bucks right so the thing that's cool about the xbox all access is that it's such an easy justification to make you're not going from spending 300 to spending 500 you're going from spending 25 a month to 35 a month right like that difference is like one trip to dunkin donuts to keep beating to death that's the same example i always use but it's like at ten dollars a month is negligible to almost to anyone who would be in the market for buying one of these consoles so it it makes upgrading to the better one you know again a no-brainer to keep reusing things i always say but um it just makes it you know an easier thing because when when i was thinking about paying for these things all right i'm like i'll just get an s you know yeah i play on a 1440p set anyway who cares right but 10 bucks a month like well yeah x makes more sense yeah\n"