REDMOND, Wash. — Microsoft is buy­ing the com­pa­ny behind pop­u­lar video games The Elder Scrolls, Doom and Fallout.

The soft­ware giant said Mon­day that it is pay­ing $7.5 bil­lion for Zen­i­Max Media, the par­ent com­pa­ny of video game pub­lish­er Bethes­da Softworks.

Microsoft said it is buy­ing Bethes­da in part to beef up its Xbox Game Pass game sub­scrip­tion ser­vice, which it says has over 15 mil­lion subscribers.

Bethes­da games, such as Starfield, which is cur­rent­ly in devel­op­ment, will launch on Xbox Game Pass the same day they launch on Xbox or com­put­ers, Microsoft said.

Microsoft has new con­soles debut­ing on Nov. 10, the Xbox Series X and stripped down Series S ver­sion. It will be com­pet­ing against Sony’s new PlaySta­tion 5 console.

R.W. Baird ana­lyst Col­in Sebas­t­ian said the deal is part of a wider indus­try trend of con­sol­i­da­tion. Microsoft already owns stu­dios that make pop­u­lar games includ­ing Minecraft and the Halo franchise.

“We believe the deal checks a lot of box­es for Microsoft, such as strength­en­ing the Xbox/Games divi­sion prod­uct port­fo­lio as com­pe­ti­tion increas­es, boost­ing the pro­file of Xbox sub­scrip­tion ser­vices, and pro­vid­ing more con­tent for the company’s cloud gam­ing ini­tia­tives,” he wrote in an investor note.

Microsoft Corp., which is based in Red­mond, Wash­ing­ton, expects the deal to close in the sec­ond half of fis­cal 2021.