In an interview, Bethesda’s senior vice president of marketing, Pete Hines, spoke to PlayStation fans, apologising for the frustration that Starfield will be an Xbox exclusive.
“I don’t know how to allay the concerns of consumer and PlayStation 5 fans other than to say I’m a PlayStation 5 player as well, and I’ve played games on that console, and there’s games I’m going to continue to play on it.”
That’s not exactly what you’d expect a senior executive at Bethesda – now an Xbox Game Studios subsidiary, don’t forget – to say in a video interview with Gamespot, but that’s exactly what senior VP of marketing Pete Hines said. Don’t get me wrong: it’s refreshing to see someone who is effectively a Microsoft executive pushing back against gross console tribalism, but it was still a surprise.
And he wasn’t done there, following that up with a surprisingly forthright apology.
“But if you want to play Starfield, [it’s] Xbox and PC. Sorry. All I can say is I apologize because I’m certain that that’s frustrating to folks,” he continued, “but there’s not a whole lot I can do about it.”
Which is true. There probably isn’t a thing that Hines, or Todd Howard, or anyone else at Bethesda can do to change the fact that Xbox wants Bethesda exclusives and spent a lot of money to get them.
When Microsoft allowed Xbox to splurge $7.5m on Bethesda/ZeniMax during its studio purchasing rampage of the past three years, presumably to cure its “exclusives problem”, there was no way it wouldn’t be getting some benefit from that deal. And Starfield, the first new IP from Fallout and The Elder Scrolls developer Bethesda Softworks in over 20 years, is the first benefit we saw at Xbox’s E3 2021 conference. It’s something of a big deal.
(And Redfall, the next game from Arkane – also an Xbox exclusive – looks ace, too.)
So if Pete has the decency to come straight out and apologise for disappointing PlayStation fans – something he totally didn’t have to and was possibly sticking his own hand in the fire to do – the least those fans can do is try and be a little bit cool about it.
Please. We’re begging you. Can we not have five minutes where the gamers don’t lose their minds over something? Please?
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