Deathloop and Ghostwire: Tokyo will still be timed PS5 exclusives after Microsoft buys Bethesda

On the heels of Microsoft's acquisition of Bethesda parent company Zenimax, Xbox boss Phil Spencer confirmed that the previously announced timed PS5 exclusivity for Deathloop and Ghostwire: Tokyo will remain unchanged. 

As reporter Jason Schreier said on Twitter, Spencer told Bloomberg that "Xbox plans to honor the PS5 exclusivity commitment" for both games, and will release future Bethesda-published games on Xbox, PC, and "other consoles on a case by case basis." 

Bethesda confirmed that Deathloop, a first-person shooter about two assassins trapped in a time loop, would make its "console debut" on PS5 when it first revealed, but we don't know its exact exclusivity window. It could be a few months, or it could be a year (though that seems extreme). Whatever it is, it remains unaffected by Microsoft's acquisition of Bethesda. And with Deathloop itself now delayed a few months into mid-2021, its exclusivity window has also been pushed back in kind. 

Ghostwire: Tokyo is in a similar situation: we know it will be a PS5 console exclusive for some time, but we don't know for how long. In case you've forgotten, Ghostwire is a surreal first-person action horror game from The Evil Within developer Tango Gameworks, and the last we saw of it was a gameplay trailer released at a PS5 event in June. Like Deathloop, Ghostwire is scheduled for 2021. 

In the aftermath of today's big news, Microsoft also confirmed that "Bethesda's future games," including the space RPG Starfield, will come to Xbox Game Pass on day one. This will give Xbox a unique selling point even if Bethesda-published games do come to other platforms like PS5, and with how hard the company has pushed Game Pass for the Xbox Series X, that may be enough for it.