Well it happened. One of the most unthinkable of thinks occurred last Monday, and a veritable shockwave was sent throughout the gaming world as Microsoft bought Zenimax Media for 7.5 billion dollars.

Because I’m primarily an Xbox gamer, and because it’s probably the most megaton gaming news to happen in recent memory, I feel like I should probably put in my two cents on the subject.

When I first read the news on Monday morning, my first thought was “holy shit!”

My second thought was, “Is this right? Was Zenimax even for sale?” Because it just seemed like the perfect spoof headline. I mean, if you’re gonna troll someone, especially a Sony fan, that would be a good way to do it. But it was indeed real, so my Monday then consisted of staring unblinkingly at the computer screen as social media and Youtube exploded. It was a true megaton.

So what I think of the whole thing? Good? Bad? Indifferent?

Well, being primarily an Xbox gamer, I couldn’t help but be a bit hyped. This was great news to me. Not because of possibility of Xbox exclusivity, I’ve never been a big proponent of exclusive, but I understand why they have their place. No, the thing that gets me really excited is the fact that all these amazing games, now and in the future, will come to Game Pass. That’s amazing. I’ll always be console gamer, but the idea that I will have access to the PC versions of Elder Scrolls 6 and Starfield really do have me considering a gaming PC. The modding community is reason enough alone.

As for Sony, ouch. This one hurt. Even with Microsoft not explicitly stating that those games will be exclusive to Xbox, the fact is that we just don’t know. And that uncertainty is enough to make Sony fans nervous. They’ll still get some titles due to pre-existing agreements, but after that, the future is unknown.

“But it doesn’t have the games.”

“It doesn’t have any exclusives.”

Those were the two most common rebuttals I heard ad nauseum on the internet for the past several years. It was the mantra of Sony fans and Xbox haters, and to be fair, it was a criticism that MS rightfully deserved. So they took steps to fix that problem, and boy were those steps far and beyond what anyone expected. If this were a sitcom, this would be the punchline where the bully gets his come-uppance.

Now, I’m not equating Sony to a bully, but they’ve had an entire generation to throw their weight around, and it’s worked well for them. Xbox fans have felt that weight all generation, as Playstation has nailed down some excellent exclusives, both timed and not, due to their impressive lead over MS in market share. But in the last few years, and more noticeably in recent months, Sony’s hubris has been in the spotlight. It will be interesting to see how Sony responds. Or can they even respond?

Possible crossovers? IP’s handed over to other studios? A lot of the fanboy wet dreams consist of the Fallout IP being passed over to Obsidian Entertainment, since Microsoft now technically owns both. They really, really want a Fallout: New Vegas 2. Will that happen? Probably not. Both studios are deep in development of multiple projects, so if we do ever see that become a reality, I would predict it would be at least a decade before we ever saw something like that. So don’t get too excited.

What would I personally like to see come from this purchase? It’s kind of hard to ask for more. I’ve been an adopter of Game Pass since it was in the closed beta, so the fact that these properties will come to the service is already everything I could’ve hoped for. BUT, if I had to make a list…

Return to Castle Wolfenstein Remaster – Even though this game was back compatible on Xbox 360, it never quite made its way onto the Xbox One. It’s one of my favorite Xbox games ever, and it was one of the first games I experienced on Xbox Live. However, it is aging, and the accelerated speed at which it runs on Xbox 360 I can’t help but feel is inaccurate, probably due to emulation and clock speeds and such. It literally gives me motion sickness whenever I try to play it. I would LOVE to play an updated, remastered version of this game on Xbox Series X. Now that Machine Games is seemingly done with the modern Wolfenstein series, it’ll be interesting to see what they have in the pipeline.

Elder Scrolls Arena, Elder Scrolls II Daggerfall – Everybody knows about Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim. But how many people have truly ever experienced the first two Elder Scrolls games? If not, its okay, they really didn’t age well. Arena was a dungeon crawler and Daggerfall used procedurally generated landscapes that were gigantic and barren. Great stuff at the time, nowadays, not so much. But I do think it would be cool to see smaller, more directed and linear revivals of these two games. Seeing as how ESVI isn’t happening any time soon, these two smaller games would be great additions to Game Pass to hold us over.

Quake 5 – I think out of everything on my wishlist, this one actually seems the most plausible. id has gotten Doom Eternal out the door, and it wouldn’t be a hard stretch of the imagination to think a Quake game might be next on the list. While I realize that Quake 4 wasn’t exactly the best, I still really enjoy the old-school FPS mechanics and the moody single-player experience. Maybe it’s time for Quake to undergo a reboot of its own; the Borg-like enemies, the Strogg, are old news and a bit cliche nowadays. Seeing what id did with DOOM and DOOM Eternal, I’d be really excited to see how they would breathe new life into the Quake franchise.

There’s also the highly probable chance that any of these games could be given the “games as a service” treatment, which I really don’t want to happen. Hopefully Microsoft and their studios will pick the IP’s that can organically support open-ended games like that instead of shoe-horning them into games that can’t *coughFallout76cough*.

In all, it’s gonna be an interesting next few years. As a gamer who is already heavily invested in the Xbox ecosystem, this doesn’t change much for me, except put more games at my disposal. It remains to be seen if Sony fans are gonna get the shaft. Whatever the outcome, it still makes the most sense to be a multi-platform gamer in the ninth generation (if you can afford it).