I don’t think so. While Bethesda exists in a bad state, it still pressures competing studios as fans will compare ‘Scrollslike’ games to what The Elder Scrolls and Fallout games could be. Plus if they close it, it’s developers need to go somewhere. Their biggest rival, Obsidian, is also owned by Microsoft.

The old head of Xbox, Phil Spencer, was very gentle to these old school behemoth studios, but pretty much everyone behind the scenes has confirmed that Asha Sharma, the new head, has finally started putting a squeeze on these companies, hence the development of Fallout 5 being handed to Obsidian.

A huge amount rides on The Elder Scrolls 6 not sucking, but I think even if it flops, I’d expect Microsoft to get one more game from them before making any big decisions, which is easily another 5 year process.

IMO, I expect TES6 to be bland as hell, looking at some comments about how it feels working with Todd post Skyrim, but fun enough to have a stable release and acceptable reviews. If that’s the case, and Microsoft don’t lock down modding to paid mods or anything, the modding scene may gradually move over, as they have from Fallout NV to Fallout 4. If the modding scene moves, the game will survive and improve.

Sadly, although I predict the modding scene moving to TES6, I think we’re on the cusp of a Skyrim Modding Renaissance that has never been seen in other games. A well curated Skyrim modlists that you could make today will absolutely smoke TES6 on quality, features, immersion and fun, but the masses won’t use modlists like this, so it won’t really block people from moving over to TES6.