It’s official: Starfield won’t be coming to PlayStation, and that’s a good thing according to the people running the Microsoft-owned Bethesda ship.
With a proper release date of November 2022 revealed at the recent Xbox and Bethesda Showcase, Microsoft slyly hammered home the point that Starfield will be exclusive to PC and Xbox Series X|S consoles, not exactly unsurprising news for a company that dropped a casual $7.5 billion on acquiring Bethesda and Zenimax. While Microsoft is honouring its deal to have Deathloop available as a PS5 console exclusive, Starfield is perhaps its biggest statement yet on where the games of Bethesda will be playable in the future.
And according to Bethesda’s Todd Howard, having that single platform focus will make for a better game overall. “You don’t ever want to leave people out, right?” Howard told The Telegraph via Wccftech.
“But at the end of the day, your ability to focus and say, this is the game I want to make, these are the platforms I want to make it on, and being able to really lean in on those is going to make for a better product. By focusing on those platforms, you really get to lean in a lot on making it the best it can be for those systems. […] And we’re big believers in all of the avenues that Xbox and Microsoft are doing to get games to more people.”
Thanks to Xbox’s cloud gaming services which will be expanding through mobile and television, Howard believes that Starfield will actually reach an even wider audience when it launches. “So we see it actually opening up more and more and more so that people’s ability to play our games – via Game Pass and other things – their ability to play our games doesn’t go down. It goes up dramatically,” he said.
Considering how notoriously buggy Bethesda games are on launch day, maybe having a single console platform in mind can free up a lot more time to nail down those glitches ahead of schedule instead of having to maker certain that users get the same game experience on hardware that has wildly different configurations and development processes when compared to each other.
It’s a pity for PlayStation fans who won’t get to experience Bethesda’s space odyssey, but the studio now has a chance to make Starfield the best game that it can possibly be on Xbox and PC. Anyway, I wonder how Star Citizen is doing lately.
Last Updated: June 17, 2021
MaSeKind
June 17, 2021 at 08:04
I don’t really want to be that guy (okay maybe I do) but as a PC only player there is a bit of schadenfreude going on here. It’s kinda nice not being the platform to miss out on the exlusives.
But I suspect Xbox/Bethesda might make a deal with Sony in the future to bring at least some of these games to PS. I don’t know the what the sales numbers for things like Skyrim or Doom is on the PS, but money is money, even if that money comes from your competitor.
And I don’t see Elder Scrolls 6 not being released on PS at some point, even if it’s a year after launch or whatever.
Not sure we’ve ever had a situation like this. Most of the studios that get bought by a console maker already made games exclusively for that console as far as I know. It’s one to make new games, quite another to make existing franchises exclusives