A lot has been said about the exclusivity of future Bethesda titles, such as The Elder Scrolls VI, since its acquisition by Microsoft, but the studio’s director Todd Howard has revealed that nothing has been set in stone.
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During an interview with Gamesindustry.biz, Howard, while not directly answering whether the games will be multiplatform going forward, did note that the company’s approach to multiplatform releases has been and will continue to be on a “case-by-case basis”, echoing a similar sentiment by Xbox chief Phil Spencer.
“We’ll do that as part of Microsoft as well. They’ve been pretty open on other platforms and not just within Xbox,” Howard said. “This is an outside perspective, but if you go back ten years at Microsoft, you wouldn’t expect them to have a full Office suite on an iPhone either.”
The exec went on to say that previous Elder Scrolls games have always been under some exclusive deal: “Morrowind was basically a console exclusive, Oblivion was a long timed-exclusive, Skyrim‘s DLC was exclusive for a long period of time.” However, Howard later added that it would be “hard to imagine” The Elder Scrolls VI being restricted only to Microsoft platforms.
Earlier this month, Spencer said that the acquisition of Zenimax Media – the parent company of Bethesda – was “not done to take games away from another player base”, referencing the possibility that The Elder Scrolls VI would be exclusive to Microsoft systems.
“Nowhere in the documentation that we put together was: ‘How do we keep other players from playing these games?’ We want more people to be able to play games, not fewer people to be able to go play games,” he added.