PlayStation’s CEO also wants to know if The Elder Scrolls 6 and Starfield will be on PS5

Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan seems as keen as anyone to know if PlayStation fans will get to play future Bethesda games.

The fate of Bethesda Softworks’ upcoming projects has been a major talking point since Microsoft announced in September that it intends to acquire ZeniMax Media for $7.5 billion.

Should the deal be completed as expected in early 2021, Xbox Game Studios will grow from 15 to 23 development teams, including Bethesda Game Studios, the maker of the Fallout and Elder Scrolls series, plus upcoming sci-fi game Starfield.

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In an interview with Russian news agency TASS, PlayStation boss Ryan was asked how he felt about the acquisition and whether PS5 players might not get to play The Elder Scrolls 6 or Starfield.

“That’s a decision that is out of our hands, we’ll wait and see what happens,” he responded. “I look forward to learning about that.

“We just take a different approach. Our emphasis has been to focus on really steady, slow, but constant organic growth of our studios, selectively bolstered by acquisitions.

“We respect the steps taken by our competition, they seem logical and sensible,” he added. “But we’re equally happy and confident, we’ve got a better launch lineup than we’ve ever had at any of our console launches.”

Employing some 2,300 staff worldwide, Bethesda Softworks studios also include id Software (Doom), ZeniMax Online Studios (Elder Scrolls Online), Arkane (Dishonored, Prey), MachineGames (Wolfenstein) and Tango Gameworks (The Evil Within).

Following the announcement of the ZeniMax deal, Xbox boss Phil Spencer said Microsoft will honour existing PS5 exclusivity agreements Bethesda has in place for games like Deathloop and Ghostwire: Tokyo.

For future Bethesda games, Spencer said “we’ll take other consoles on a case-by-case basis.”

More recently, Xbox CFO Tim Stuart said Microsoft wants future Bethesda games to be “either first or better or best” on Xbox platforms.

Further reading

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Elder Scrolls 6 being Xbox exclusive ‘is hard to imagine’, says Bethesda’s Todd Howard

Talks with Microsoft about potential software exclusives have reportedly yet to take place

Elsewhere in the TASS interview, Ryan suggested Sony may have an ace up its sleeve to counter Xbox Game Pass. “There is actually news to come, but just not today,” he said when asked how PlayStation will respond to Microsoft’s subscription service.

“We have PlayStation Now which is our subscription service, and that is available in a number of markets,” he continued.

Ryan recently predicted PS5 owners won’t have to wait until the tail end of the console’s lifecycle for some generation-defining games.

And he told TASS “it’s probably 2022 that you’re going to see some wonderful things in the same way that it was 2015/2016 for the previous generation, when the generation defining-games started to be published”.