Boosteroid: There’s No Evidence of Activision Games Joining the Cloud Any Time Soon; CMA Is Slowing Innovation

wccftech.com:

The surprising final decision of the UK's Competition and Markets Authority to block the proposed Microsoft/Activision Blizzard merger, a deal worth $68.7 billion, affected other companies like Boosteroid, too.

In an attempt to show that it wouldn't be foreclosing any cloud competitors, Microsoft signed multiple ten-year deals with platforms like NVIDIA's GeForce NOW, Boosteroid, Ubitus, EE, and Nware. As part of those agreements, Microsoft agreed to license its Xbox games so that they might be streamed on those cloud services, and the deal also included Activision Blizzard's titles if the deal closes.

Activision Blizzard's games haven't been available on any cloud service since NVIDIA's GeForce NOW left beta to formally launch in February 2020. At that point, it lost all of the publisher's games (and many other publishers, too). NVIDIA said at the time it was due to a misunderstanding and that it hoped to get highly popular games like Call of Duty and Overwatch back, but it simply never happened.

There has since been no indication from the publisher that that would change. However, as part of its final ruling, the CMA claims to be sure that will be the case even absent the merger.

I've contacted Boosteroid's Head of Strategic Communications Antonina Batova to petition for a comment on this topic. You can find her official response below.

Antonina Batova: We have no evidence as to that Activision is going to start providing games to cloud platforms in the near future. On the contrary, the cloud gaming community knows that Activision has quite a harsh standing on cloud gaming, which only confirms that most likely they are not going to be available on cloud gaming services in the near future. In theory it is, of course,