While Microsoft waits to see if its blockbuster merger with Activision Blizzard will be approved by regulators, the company announced a separate team up with a game streaming service called Nvidia GeForce Now. Microsoft said that all of its Xbox PC games will be available on the service.
Microsoft President Brad Smith announced the partnership at a press conference at Brussels, according to a tweet by the managing editor of Windows Central Gaming.
Smith also said that all of Activision Blizzard’s games will be available as well, and that “the future is cross platform.” There is a caveat, however; unlike Xbox Game Pass, people will still have to buy the actual games, as the deal is for 10 years of streaming rights, according to a press release.
“Xbox remains committed to giving people more choice and finding ways to expand how people play,” Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer said. “This partnership will help grow NVIDIA’s catalog of titles to include games like Call of Duty, while giving developers more ways to offer streaming games. We are excited to offer gamers more ways to play the games they love.”
Jeff Fisher, the senior vice president for GeForce at NVIDIA, said the partnership will “propel cloud gaming into a mainstream offering that appeals to gamers at all levels of interest and experience.”
“Through this partnership, more of the world’s most popular titles will now be available from the cloud with just a click, playable by millions more gamers,” Fisher said.
The agreement means that NVIDIA is now behind the Activision Blizzard acquisition, and the company said that its concerns about the deal were now resolved. Microsoft also announced that it offered Sony a 10-year-deal to bring new Call of Duty games to the platform. It recently made a similar deal with Nintendo.
Sony has yet to agree to the proposed deal, which makes sense because acquiescing to Microsoft would help its position with regulators concerning the acquisition with Activision Blizzard, and that’s not necessarily in Sony’s best interests.
Perhaps with this in mind, Smith showed graphs illustrating how Sony trounces Microsoft in market share globally by about three to one. In Japan, Sony has a 96% market share over 4% by Microsoft, Smith said.
There are some shrewd moves by Microsoft behind all this. By playing nice with Nintendo and Sony and getting NVIDIA on board, the company wants to show regulators that it won’t be some behemoth monopoly that will overtake all of gaming. It remains to be seen whether these moves will ultimately result in the acquisition going forward.