Ubisoft details Ubisoft+ plans for Activision Blizzard games
It’s the big news of the day: Activision Blizzard King is part of Xbox now. Ubisoft helped bring this development about by agreeing to purchase the cloud streaming rights for Activision Blizzard titles outside of the European Economic Area – a divestment that was crucial in netting final approval from the UK’s Competition and Market Authority (CMA).
But what exactly does that mean for Ubisoft? That’s a question the company has now tried to answer. Ubisoft’s Chris Early, who was part of the negotiations to make this deal happen, has stated the following: “Taking on these rights allows Ubisoft to bring Activision Blizzard games like Call of Duty to Ubisoft+, as well as license the streaming access of these games to cloud gaming companies, service providers and console makers – meaning we’re helping expand access for more players across streaming services.”
Ubisoft has revealed some details on what it plans on doing with its newly acquired rights.
Ubisoft
This includes “all the Activision Blizzard games that are being distributed today and includes all the games that Activision Blizzard will release over the next 15 years.” Any DLC for these games is part of this package as well. Early continued: “To clarify, all the games that are coming from Activision Blizzard in the next 15 years and those games that exist now, we have those streaming rights in perpetuity. So, even after the terms of this deal come to an end, we will still have those rights and we will still be able to provide those games to people and companies throughout the world, so there are a lot of possibilities.”
Ubisoft will be the exclusive rights holder outside of the European Economic Area, so any other service that wants to offer streaming of Activision Blizzard games will need to come to Ubisoft. In the European Economic Area, Microsoft has to allow any company that requests it to stream its games as part of the deal it made with the European Union to get the merger approved, hence Ubisoft does not hold the exclusive rights there.
All of the Call of Duty games could potentially become part of Ubisoft+ soon.
Activision
Early explained it like this: “In the European Economic Area, the European Commission required Microsoft to allow cloud streaming services to let anybody who owns the games in that territory to play the Activision Blizzard games via streaming for free. For example, a company in France could come to Microsoft and say, ‘I want to stream the gameplay of Call of Duty to people who own Call of Duty already,’ and Microsoft is required to license those rights for free to that company so players can stream games they own.”
It seems like Ubisoft’s plans aren’t exactly set in stone when it comes to its new treasure trove of games. “Our expectation is that they will be on Ubisoft+, and then we have the rights to be able to license them individually to companies as well,” Early said. “We know players are excited for more games to come to Ubisoft+, and we will take the time we need to make sure that the back end fully supports the experience we want players to have. Now that the deal is closed, the operational element can begin to kick off.”
