Microsoft has now seemingly disclosed confidential industry information in their attempt to convince regulators to approve their acquisition of Activision Blizzard King.
This time, the company has revealed to the FTC in their filing to the regulator that they are working on a game that may take as much as a decade.
The text on Microsoft’s own filing goes like this:
“Microsoft’s own experience with releasing AAA games reflects the cost and time to develop such content. Halo Infinite, a recent title from the Microsoft’s first-party Halo franchise, was in production for REDACTED years, and cost almost REDACTED million. Other AAA games may take even longer to develop. For instance, according to one Microsoft executive, REDACTED a forthcoming title from the franchise REDACTED, may take a REDACTED to develop.”
Some fans speculate the game being mentioned here is The Elder Scrolls 6, which was announced in 2018, but may have been planned in production for longer.
Rather than being signs of the game’s scale or trouble development, it may simply be a case of a project being held off because the developers or the technology was not ready to make it happen. This was the case with Metroid Dread’s long development history.
Unlike Metroid Dread, many fans did expect that there would eventually be a The Elder Scrolls 6, but perhaps the prolonged popularity of The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim unintentionally created a situation where the studio just couldn’t start making the next game while the current game in the franchise continued to be financially viable.
In fact, The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim is one of the most ported games of all time, rivaling the likes of Grand Theft Auto 5 in its longevity. Like Grand Theft Auto 5, it has gone to three generations of PlayStation consoles and three generations of Xbox consoles. Alongside this, its original Windows boxed release in 2011 was augmented by a special edition, that was first released to Steam, and then complete and DRM-free to GOG. There are even ports on the Nintendo Switch and Amazon’s Luna cloud gaming platform.
If this game happens to not be The Elder Scrolls 6, we are completely in the dark on what possible project Microsoft could have in mind. It’s possible that such a large scale endeavor was planned with cloud gaming, VR, or AR in mind, technologies expected to be more viable in the future. Perhaps more likely, it could be a live service game.
Whatever the case, it would be interesting if Microsoft shed light onto this mystery sooner rather than later.
