Ubisoft Confirms Activision Blizzard Games Will Be Part Of Ubisoft+

Hot on the heels of the Microsoft acquisition of Activision, Ubisoft have confirmed that they hold the streaming rights for all Activision Blizzard (ABK) games that exist now and for the next 15 years. This was one of the clauses imposed on Microsoft by various regulators in order to get the deal across the line.

The deal means that any streaming rights for games produced and published by ABK will have to go through Ubisoft, including Microsoft having to licence their own games for streaming. As a result of this, expect to see the likes of Warcraft and Call of Duty be available through the Ubisoft+ streaming service. It’s not expected that this will cause too many issues for players and ABK games are still coming to Game Pass, but the caveat is that they won’t be exclusive to the Xbox Cloud Streaming part of the service.

In a blog post on Ubisoft’s website Chris Early, Ubisoft’s SVP, Strategic Partnerships & Business Development addresses what it means for players.

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.

We’ve always been a technologically forward-looking company and we believe that we can create differentiation and competitive advantage for our products through technology in addition to the games themselves. We’ve been active in the streaming space for a long time and that’s one of the reasons Microsoft came to us; we were the first studio that Google worked with for Stadia; the first company that Amazon worked with for Luna; and we’ve been partners with NVIDIA GeForce Now for years. To Microsoft, it made sense that if somebody was going to be familiar with the space and know what the value would be for streaming, it would be us. And we saw the value as well.

Chris Early, Ubisoft Website

We don’t have to worry about that side of things, just know that ABK games will be playable through Game Pass as well as being streamed from Ubisoft+ next year. It’s worth noting that Ubisoft+ is available PC, Xbox, Amazon Luna, and crucially on PlayStation via Ubisoft Plus Classics. This means that even if Microsoft chooses a particular game to be exclusive, say the next Crash Bandicoot game, if they were to offer it on Xbox Cloud Streaming, then it could also be released on the aforementioned platforms.

It’s too early to tell how Microsoft and Activision deal will pan out for players over the next 15 years though. The gaming landscape will be a very different place but what is certain is that fans of the Activision Blizzard franchises will have more places to play their games.

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