Starfield Might Have Skipped Xbox and Become PlayStation Exclusive Instead

Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox, claimed that one of the reasons Microsoft acquired Bethesda and ZeniMax Media was due to the understanding that Sony would make Starfield PS5 exclusive.

“When we acquired ZeniMax, one of the impetus for that is that Sony had done a deal for Deathloop and Ghostwire... to pay Bethesda to not ship those games on Xbox,” Spencer said in his testimony. 

Sony gained temporal exclusivity for titles like Deathloop and Ghostwire: Tokyo just before Microsoft bought ZeniMax and Bethesda. Despite the fact that the producers of those games became first-party Xbox studios, the deals were kept even after the purchase was completed, and it took a full year before either of those titles was released on Xbox. Spencer said there were suspicions that Starfield would experience a similar fate during the hearings on the Xbox-Activision merger.

“So the discussion about Starfield when we heard that Starfield was potentially also going to end up skipping Xbox, we can’t be in a position as a third-place console where we fall further behind on our content ownership so we’ve had to secure content to remain viable in the business,” said Spencer. 

Soon after, in the first few months of 2021, the reports began to spread that Starfield would only be available on the Xbox Series X and S. The game will be released on September 6, 2023, for Microsoft Windows and Xbox Series X and S.

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