Xbox and Playstation stands at a game fair in 2016
Microsoft has acquired the American media company ZeniMax Media for more than 6 billion euros. With this, the company has acquired some popular games for the new Xbox, which will be released in November.
ZeniMax Media publishes Doom, the Fallout games and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, among others. The latter two series are made by the well-known developer Bethesda Softworks, which is now also in the hands of Microsoft.
The number of game studios that fall under the Microsoft banner will increase from 15 to 23 as a result of this deal. The games from the Zenimax studios may be made exclusively for the Xbox in the future, but that is not the case yet. Microsoft can now influence the development process of those games.
New Generation
According to Microsoft and ZeniMax Media, the deal is an intensification of the cooperation between the companies over the decades. “The big winners are our fans,” said ZeniMax CEO Robert Altman. “Our games are only getting better.”
Microsoft will release two new Xbox consoles in November: the Xbox Series X and the Xbox Series S. In the same month, competitor Sony will also release two new versions of its own game console: the Playstation 5 and the Playstation 5 Digital Edition.
In recent months, Microsoft has made unsuccessful attempts at another major acquisition: the music video app TikTok. Under pressure from the US government, Chinese parent company ByteDance had to part with US customers’ user data. Ultimately, the Chinese chose the American software company Oracle and the supermarket chain Walmart.
