Microsoft has entered a deal to purchase Bethesda’s parent company ZeniMax Media for $7.5 billion USD. That means that everything from Fallout and the Elder Scrolls to Doom and Wolfenstein are coming under the Xbox umbrella, and Microsoft has confirmed that the company’s biggest titles will be making their way to Xbox Game Pass.
“We will be adding Bethesda’s iconic franchises to Xbox Game Pass for console and PC”, Xbox chief Phil Spencer says in a Microsoft blog. No specific titles or timelines are named in the announcement, but it’s safe to expect past Bethesda titles like Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Doom Eternal to hit the service sooner rather than later.
A number of games under the Bethesda umbrella are already on Game Pass, though some have only been available on the console version of the service. On Game Pass for PC, you can currently play Fallout 76 and Wolfenstein: Youngblood. Dishonored 2 is also currently on Game Pass for PC, but is scheduled to leave at the end of September.
With Bethesda Game Studios now a first-party Xbox dev, you can also expect the Starfield release date and The Elder Scrolls 6 release date to bring those respective titles to Game Pass.
The Bethesda-published Deathloop and Ghostwire: Tokyo will still be timed PlayStation 5 exclusives, as Bloomberg reports. That exclusivity only applies to consoles, however – both games will still come to PC on day one, thought the deal with Sony might make their Game Pass prospects a bit sketchier.