Shopping spree
Over the past two years, Microsoft has been on a shopping spree. It’s been buying studios, big and small, and uniting them under the Xbox Game Studios umbrella. The company’s biggest purchase, last year’s $7.5 billion deal to acquire ZeniMax Media and all of its subsidiaries, including Bethesda, ID Software, and Arkane Studios, will finally come to full fruition in 2022.
Microsoft hasn’t exactly been able to benefit from that deal this year at all. The largest release from any of those companies, Arkane’sDeathloop, is, ironically, exclusive to the PS5 due to an agreement made between ZeniMax and Sony before the acquisition.
Next year, though, that’s set to change. Machine Games, another studio owned by ZeniMax, has two titles ripe for announcements next year: Its untitled Indiana Jones game and a third mainline entry in the Wolfenstein reboot. The former has generated a ton of noise, while the latter is simply long-awaited by fans of the franchise.
Then there’s Playground Games and its upcoming Fable title. There hasn’t been news from the studio about the game since its announcement in July 2020. It’s reasonable to expect that some news regarding the game will come about next year.
The payoff
But the main seller of Xbox Game Pass subscriptions next year will come from Xbox’s main target of the ZeniMax Media acquisition. Bethesda’s first original title in over a decade,Starfield, is set tolaunch in November 2022. Releases from Bethesda are many things, including few and far between, highly anticipated, and well-publicized. And they always sell well.
The company is prestigious for its two other franchises, Fallout and The Elder Scrolls, which practically dominate the world of Western RPGs.Starfieldalready has hype around it, and that’s only going to increase once another trailer (and hopefully gameplay) are shown at next year’s E3. Once it’s time for that game to actually launch, it’s only a question of how many users will flock to Game Pass to play it for a low price on day one.
