Cloud streaming will change gaming as Netflix did TV, Ubisoft boss believes
eurogamer.netUbisoft chief Yves Guillemot believes cloud streaming will be as transformative to gaming in the coming years as Netflix was to TV.
Speaking with the Financial Times, Guillemot looked back on Netflix's initial foray into streaming and noted the market's early scepticism. «Their shares fell a lot and they were widely criticised,» he recalled. «Today, we see what they have become.»
Guillemot said he believes the same will eventually ring true for video game streaming as well, but admitted it will likely take some time. «But when it takes off, it will happen very quickly,» he said.
Guillemot's comments come just weeks after Microsoft announced it had agreed to sell the streaming rights for Activision Blizzard games to Ubisoft if it completes its $68.7bn takeover of the Call of Duty publisher.
According to the exec, Ubisoft was «pushed… to go forward» with this deal with Microsoft because of the company's faith in the future of streaming. «We strongly believe in the next five to 10 years, many games will be streamed and will also be produced in the cloud,» Guillemot said.
The exec believes that these streaming rights, along with new technologies, will enable Ubisoft to increase its reach in countries outside of Europe and America, with Guillemot touching on the adoption of mobile payments in Africa.
«Countries that need to progress very quickly often jump to new technologies and skip old methods of the old systems,» he said. «So we think that [these regions] will move more quickly to streaming and the cloud than others.»
Cloud gaming has notoriously been a tough nut to crack. A little shy of a year ago, Google announced it was closing down Stadia, its own cloud gaming service. At the time of this announcement, Stadia
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