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Microsoft's acqusition of ZeniMax and Bethesda has been approved

The European Commission has no problem with the developers studios of The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Doom and so many other franchises joining Xbox Game Studios.
Eirik Hyldbakk Furu Editor-in-Chief Norway 8 March 2021

It's been close to six months since Microsoft confirmed the company was in the process of buying ZeniMax, the parent company of Bethesda, but one of the reasons why Phil Spencer, Todd Howard and crew have been very careful when answering questions about what this means in terms of the future is that deals like this still needs the approval of antitrust regulators and such across the world to be finalised. This has now been done.

The European Commission has as promised made its decision, and does as expected approving the merger of Microsoft and ZeniMax. As the deal was already approved in United States, this means that the two giants are free to finalise everything.

Now we'll just have to wait for Phil Spencer and Team Xbox to publish a celebratory article or blog post and tell us when the long-rumoured event where we'll learn a bit more about what their plans for the relatively near future are will take place. Hopefully this includes more specifics about exclusivity and such...

Do you think all Bethesda games will be Xbox exclusive, some of them or none after Deathloop and Ghostwire Tokyo?

Editor-in-Chief Norway Eirik Hyldbakk Furu wrote for Gamereactor from around 2015 to 2026, first as news editor and from 2022 as editor-in-chief of the Norwegian edition. He covered video games across news, previews and reviews for both the Norwegian and international sites.
Full profile Gamereactor author since 2015 · 3,588 published articles
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