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“Paradoxically, if Bethesda is making games exclusively for Microsoft, it’s probably less valuable, not more.”
Earlier this week in Debugger, columnist Owen Williams pointed out that the future of device ownership may be subscription services: Why buy an Xbox for $500 when you can spread the cost into small chunks over a series of two years?
In a more recent piece on our sibling publication Marker, James Surowiecki illustrates exactly how far Microsoft is willing to go to support this model, dropping $7.5 billion to acquire ZeniMax Media (owner of Bethesda Game Studios, the company behind Doom and the Elder Scrolls series) in large part to bolster its nascent Game Pass service.
As Surowiecki explains, partially in the big quote up above, the deal actually doesn’t make all that much sense. His piece is a window into how one of the world’s largest gadget makers is doing business, and a must-read for anyone interested in the forces shaping how we experience consumer technology.
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