Xbox's Matt Booty says game streaming is a "very, very small market"

gamedeveloper.com:

It might surprise industry watchers that Xbox Cloud Gaming—the cloud streaming service included in Xbox Game Pass—is the center of regulatory scrutiny as Microsoft attempts to acquire Activision Blizzard. UK regulator Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has stated that the deal could "alter the future of the fast-growing cloud gaming market."

Microsoft's done its best to allay that concern by signing deal after deal giving other cloud platforms access to Xbox Game Pass. Now Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty is doing his best to downplay the size of the cloud game market and its impact on Xbox's business.

Calling it a "very, very small market" in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Booty went so far as to say he's "not even sure you would call it a market yet." He declined to give any specifics on the number of Cloud Gaming users, but said that it isn't at "the scale" of the 150 million players accessing Microsoft's first-party titles every month.

"For us, it’s something that we consider almost more experimental that we’re trying out to see how it works," he added. He noted that the Xbox team has worked to support touch-friendly controls for players accessing the platform on mobile devices, but that no studio to date has designed a mobile-first game meant to be played on the cloud service.

If the cloud streaming market is so small, why is Xbox even playing in it then? "It’s something that we feel we need to be up on being involved with the technology," Booty said. "We have some great partners that we’re giving our content to, but for me, it comes back to the content and focusing on things that have scale."

Because the UK CMA has chosen to fixate on the size of the cloud streaming market for video games, Microsoft has