Wild Card: Ubisoft Enters Acti/Xbox Merger

gamesreviews.com:

In what will hopefully be the final surprise twist in the wild Activision/Microsoft Merger – Ubisoft will control the cloud rights to Activision Blizzard games for the next 15 years.

Nobody saw it coming, but early this morning the companies involved made the announcement. Ubisoft will offer all classic and new Activision games for the next 15 years through Ubisoft+. They will also be able to license out the games to other streaming companies, including Microsoft. This has led to the kind of funny situation where Ubisoft is paying Microsoft for the overall rights, only for Microsoft to pay to get the rights back for xCloud. It’d be fascinating to see how this deal works, although presumably we never will.

This will cover all previous games and all future games for 15 years, at which point any new games will be licensed by Microsoft.

This will add an incredible string to Ubisoft’s bow. It won’t be the only place to play Call of Duty in the cloud, but being the company that controls that is going to be very rewarding.

And, hypothetically, it could mean any Xbox exclusives still make it to PlayStation. Via an equally hypothetical Ubisoft cloud app.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Microsoft will still get paid. They will receive “a one-off payment and through a market-based wholesale pricing mechanism, including an option that supports pricing based on usage”. And it means PlayStation fans will potentially still get access to otherwise unavailable games. And, I guess, that may incentivise Xbox to release native versions too. Because if people can play your games anyway, why not profit directly?

Ubisoft will control the global rights to streaming of Activision titles except in the EU, where Microsoft will retain them