“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…